Lately I've renewed my effort to digitize and back up my massive
DVD/BD collection, which involves quite a bit of ripping. I've made
good progress, but some of the effort seems wasted, especially since
I'm overwriting older files with new, higher resolution files, i.e.
854x480 instead of 720x406. Or even upscaling to <width>x720 or
1280x<height>. But this comes with its own (usually minor) set of
obstacles, mainly DRM. The other is deinterlacing, but that's not
today's topic.

I've discussed DRM before[0], but to those not in the know, it's a way
that companies protect their copyright and does little to stop piracy:
it basically only screws over legit owners and rips/unencrypted copies
are made usually pretty fast. Some forms of DRM I support (like subtle
game mods that screws over the player by making things just a little
bit harder). Other forms, mainly those centered around the restriction
of backups, are the bane of my backups. Most DVDs are encrypted, but
can easily be decrypted by DVDDecrypter (Windows) or MakeMKV
(Win/Mac/Linux). I can even rip the disc with the encryption intact
using dvdbackup (Linux), but that's less than ideal because it
preserves the annoying encryption that requires one of the two
previous programs to remove anyway.

Anyway, the hardest encryption, not shockingly, is BD encryption. The
only freeware (technically beta... for about a decade and a half) that
can rip BDs is MakeMKV. This is both good and bad: good because it
makes the processing more straightforward, bad because there are
serious issues with updating and registration keys not being posted on
time so you're screwed unless you mess with your PCs clock. Or you can
pay $50 to do something that is already available for free. Anyway,
it's annoying dealing with the keys and permissions, but it's doable
and MakeMKV is downright necessary for me to do my backups. There's
also a bit on LibreDrive which as far as I can tell is some kind of
firmware movement that basically disables the BD protection that
basically tells your BD drive that it can't read drives until it has a
certificate issued again or something like that. I'm still pretty hazy
on it, but I know this lack of LibreDrive for my BD drive means I have
to use the GUI every single time I want to rip something. AACS LA can
go eff themselves.

Last bit of DRM I'll touch on is that added to ebooks. It's not
simple, but it's not too hard to remove that DRM, at least for Kindle
or Adobe Digital Editions books. But it's simply a chore and for that
reason I haven't bought an ebook in years. It basically requires
calibre with a 3rd-party plugin and some username shenanigans just to
work, and if you don't have it installed or recycled/wiped the machine
that did, you have to go through the plugin installation all over
again. I greatly applaud Tor[1] for their steps to rid the world of
DRM, at least in ebooks. I strongly recommend checking them out first
if you're trying to buy an ebook as you won't have to deal with ebook
conversions and Calibre plugins if you just get them from Tor (I mean
you still can, but you don't *have* to). I have successfully backed up
a vast majority of my book library, including painstakingly scanning
and running the scans through OCR to create epubs and text files. And
I can read them on any device, be it my Nook SimpleTouch or my Android
phone.

0. gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~np89/glog/20200130-digital_media.txt
1. https://www.tor.com/2013/04/29/tor-books-uk-drm-free-one-year-later/