Because it is dirt cheap compared to HDDs where I am, I will be storing my movie collection in Blu-Ray. And partially because I think spinny media is cool.
I currently got two secondhand options for the drive:
- Pioneer BDR-209EBK
- Panasonic UJ272
The drive will be plugged into my server (6th gen i5-6600, old desktop) via SATA. It will probably only read the disks I write so DRM is not much of a concern.
The disks will mostly be used as archival storage. Most of the time, they will be transferred to SSD a few days/hours before streaming, though sometimes they may be played straight from BD-R
Aside from that, most of the Blu-Ray writing software I found is GUI. So I’d also appreciate something I could control via web or CLI
I was trying to do this recently and learned that, I guess certain bluray drives have been identified as compromised by the powers that be. As a result newer bluray disks ship with a list of those drives, and when your drive’s firmware sees that it is on the list, it will refuse to open the disk. I have an old bd drive from ~2008 that was ~60% effective at ripping my library.
I also tried my best to use fully open source tools in combination with an up-to-date KEYDB.CFG, but never had as much success as just using makemkv.
The most extreme route I found is to refer to makemkv’s list of drives that can have their firmware flashed to prevent it from refusing to read a disk. I haven’t gone that route, but would definitely consider it if I was looking for a drive.