Didn’t know this phenomenon had a name. That’s what I’m doing right now however. I want to have enough money to be unemployed for a year or two.

You’re preaching to the choir. That’s why we spend time making remuxes and encodes. But for release groups to make those we need the format to survive, because Hollywood won’t make the physical media if there’s no copy protection.

It’s not really dead, but they’ve definitely scaled down their operations. With streaming services increasing their prices YoY I believe the return to physical media will be cheaper in some cases.

Highly doubt you can monetize it. Most groups do it as a hobby because they care about preservation. Internal groups don’t lack the time or storage space. What we do lack is dedicated BluRay rippers from distant regions.

Yeah, really makes you wonder if it’s by design as some sort of evil anti piracy measure.

You would be surprised but in the US DVDs are still king. They sell far better than regular BluRays and even better than 4K UHD BRs. So saying it’s dead is difficult.

As a ripper myself for one of the internal groups, both DVDs and Blu rays have this annoying thing where they include the subtitles in image format (PGS for BRs, forgot what the DVD one was). It’s a headache for the rippers and encoders because we then need to OCR the subtitles for the encodes we put out there. Sometimes if we get lucky the movie is on a streaming platform making this process obsolete as we grab the .vtt files from the streaming service and sync it with the BR we’re making (as well as transforming it to .srt) . My only assumption as to why MPAA decided on image format subs for both DVDs and BRs is because it makes it easy to deal with different languages and the likes, you just display a static image and fk everything else. But for the people putting out quality releases if we ship PGS that means we’re just doing a bad job.

Support your fav trackers (and their internals!)

Haha, the excuse they like to use in situations like this is “DEI hires caused this”. Musk, have you been DEI hiring?