I have not tried much of anything yet. I just got a cheap laptop with a BD which came with Windows and VLC. I popped in a blu-ray disc from the library and it could not handle it… something about not having a aacs decoder or something like that. I didn’t spend any time on it yet but ultimately in principle I would install debian and try to liberate the drive to read BDs.

thanks!

Though I should mention my original motivation with makemkv was to rip blu-ray discs, which has complications that go beyond DVD. But the DVD guide will still be quite useful.

Fun suggestion… could be useful to have as a side hack if congestion becomes an issue but I doubt it would come to that. They have what seems to be a high-end switch with 20 or so ports and internal fans.

The event is ~2—3 hours or so. If someone needs the full Debian (80 gb!), I think over USB 2 it would not transfer in that timeframe. USB 2 sticks may be rare but at this event there are some ppl with old laptops that have no USB 3 sockets. A lot of people plug into ethernet. And the switch looks somewhat more serious than a 4-port SOHO… it has like 20+ ports with fans, so I don’t get the impression ethernet congestion would be an issue.

I think they could do the job. I’ve never admin’d an NFS so I’m figuring there’s a notable learning curve there. SAMBA, well, maybe. I’ve used it before. I’m leaning toward ProFTPd at the moment but if that gives me any friction I guess I’ll consider SAMBA. Perhaps I’ll go into overachiever mode and have both SAMBA and ProFTPd pointing to the same directory.

Two possible issues w/that w.r.t my use case:

• not in official Debian repos – not a show stopper but definately points against it for installation and maintenance burdons across migrations
• apparently read-only access for users. This is fine in simple cases where I would just be sharing with others, but a complete solution enables users to share with others on the same server by uploading. Otherwise everyone with a file to share must run rejetto hfs.

Nonetheless, I appreciate the suggestion. It could be handy in some situations.

oh, sorry. Indeed. I answered from the notifications page w/out context. Glad to know Filezilla will work for that!

I use filezilla but AFAIK it’s just a client not a server.

Indeed i noticed openssh-sftp-server was automatically installed with Debian 12. Guess I’ll look into that first. Might be interesting if ppl could choose between FTP or mounting with SSHFS.

(edit) found this guide

Thanks for mentioning it. It encouraged me to look closer at it and I believe it’s well suited for my needs.

Well it’s still the same problem. I mean, it’s likely piracy to copy the public lib’s disc to begin with, even if just for a moment. From there, if I want to share it w/others I still need to be able to exit the library with the data before they close. So it’d still be a matter of transcoding as a distinctly separate step.

What’s the point of spending a day compressing something that I only need to watch once?

If I pop into the public library and start a ripping process using Handbrake, the library will close for the day before the job is complete for a single title. I could check-out the media, but there are trade-offs:

• no one else can access the disc while you have it out
• some libraries charge a fee for media check-outs
• privacy (I avoid netflix & the like to prevent making a record in a DB of everything I do; checking out a movie still gets into a DB)
• libraries tend to have limits on the number of media discs you can have out at a given moment
• checking out a dozen DVDs will take a dozen days to transcode, which becomes a race condition with the due date
• probably a notable cost in electricity, at least on my old hardware

Wow, thanks for the research and effort! I will be taking your approach for sure.

I’ll have a brief look but I doubt ffmpeg would know about DVD CSS encryption.