So you want to buy some physical media. No, you don't? You just want to pirate? That's understandable; >Why would I want to spend money on movies when piracy is free? The big studios don't deserve money for the garbage they put out, but we are living in a golden age of physical releases, and they need to pay for sourcing and restoring films somehow. Consider the following: <4k Blu-rays can capture most of the detail of 35mm film <UHD releases are becoming fairly common <Streaming has become dominant, and rights to old B-movie distribution is cheap if they handle the restoration. <Film prints are only going to get rarer and rarer as they are lost, destroyed, or deteriorate Preserving these releases is important, and the opportunity will not last forever. >Where can I buy from? There are many common outlets to purchase these releases from, and each has its own niche. Criterion - focuses on high-brow and arthouse: https://www.criterion.com/ Vinegar Syndrome - mostly restoring grimy B-movies and smut: https://vinegarsyndrome.com/ Shout Factory - mostly TV show box sets and B-movies with occasional foreign releases: https://www.shoutfactory.com/ Arrow - UK label that might have overlapping releases with the others (because they get the Euro distribution rights) and has a good mix of both B-movies and older mainstream releases: https://www.arrowvideo.com/ Kino Lorber - has a lot of independent releases including newer titles: https://www.kinolorber.com/ There are other labels, as well as some newer distributors like A24 that are actually producing new releases, but these are the big ones with quality offerings. >What about sales? All of the major labels have regular sales. Criterion: February and October, but you can also check Barnes & Noble's film section for discounts in July and November. Shout Factory: March sales, plus some flash sales during Comic-Con. Vinegar Syndrome: Black Friday and Halfway to Black Friday (end of May) for regular sales. Valentine's day will see a flash sale on their smut offerings. Note that Black Friday sales have memberships available, and purchasing will get you free shipping, and they will send you movies every month. Arrow: Easter weekend and Black Friday. Others may have sales sporadically, but a lot of labels just do limited runs and wait for them to run out, no clearance. They often sell out in hours or days. It's recommended you pick stuff up on sale, for obvious reasons. >How do I rip films? What about UHDs? Ideally you need to find a drive that supports UHD but isn't advertised as having it. Many of these use the same parts and have the same firmware base as UHD drives, but the firmware is patches to prevent reading UHD discs. If you flash it with the proper firmware (or buy them pre-flashed) they will read UHD discs without the full copy protection. You can find a list of compatible drives, how to flash them, and where to buy them pre-flashed on the MakeMKV forums: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=16&sid=be392f4d9c8817d0c758bf1e139e55e7 You can also find them on normal sites like Newegg, if you don't want to deal with someone directly, but expect it to be maintained by chinks. You're probably better off doing a direct transaction with some random guy off those forums if you want any kind of support. Once you have a drive that supports the kind of discs you want to rip (any blu-ray drive should be able to handle non-UHD, 1080p disks) you should probably just use MakeMKV for the simplest way to rip. Otherwise you need to copy the m2ts files yourself and try to preserve all the data. MakeMKV constantly posts new free trial codes, and you can use them endlessly, but sometimes they don't post a new one for a couple weeks, which is inconvenient. The price is reasonable, so if you find yourself using it a lot then just buy a license.You're already buying discs, why not buy the software? Unfortunately there is not FOSS solution that works as well as MakeMKV. On the bright side, they do the hard work of cracking encryption keys on news discs. >The file sizes are huge! What do I do with them? Probably encode them to something smaller. I like to store them full-size for preservation. I also grab the commentary tracks and featurettes, but most people just want the film and a single audio track, plus maybe some subtitles. You can use ffmpeg to reduce it to what you want and get a reasonable file size out of it. If you need to manage a library, you can look into Plex or Jellyfin for hosting your own personal streaming service. You can also make some smaller encodes and share them with your fellow anons, if you're so inclined.