March 2026: Disc Drives and DRM

Digital piracy – the process of acquiring or distributing copyrighted material without permission – is illegal. Mishandling copyrighted material, even for personal use, can be in violation of copyright law. I do not condone or support any action that would be in violation of copyright law. Any and all actions described in this post are purely hypothetical and any information shared is for educational purposes only.

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably getting tired of streaming services and their bull$#!%. I like to own things, and I don’t want to put up with the hassle of inconsistent internet connections dumping the quality of whatever you’re trying to watch.

Physical media stores are also making a comeback, so it’s easier than ever to get second hand DVDs and Blu-Rays. Most second-hand films range from just a few dollars to a max of about 20 bucks. If you don’t feel like buying movies, your local libraries will probably have a small collection of films that you can rent for free.

An added benefit of physical media is that it’s much easier to make backups of them for personal use. This means you can rip a movie and store it on your laptop / PC / media server and watch it any time you want without having to mess around with putting the disc in every time.

That said, you still have to read the disc at least once in order to make a backup. To do that, you need some form of optical drive that can read the media you want to watch. Most optical drives are compatible with at least CDs and DVDs, but Blu-Ray functionality is something that not every drive has. Up until recently, I was using an old CD reader/burner that my dad lent to me, but it wasn’t able to read any of the Blu-Rays that I had been slowly amassing a collection of.

Recently, I decided that it was time to upgrade to a drive that could actually read the movies I’d been buying. It was my birthday recently, so some family members had sent me Amazon gift cards totaling to $50. I typically don’t like buying anything off of Amazon if I could help it, but I’m not about to lecture my grandparents over the ethics of their gift-giving.

Name brand drives – LG, Pioneer, and ASUS being the big ones – typically cost about $100 with Blu-Ray compatibility. These are the brands I’d recommend researching first if you’re also in the market for an optical drive, as they tend to be higher quality and have better compatibility with some software that I’ll be mentioning later.

There’s also a wide variety of cheap drives that you can get for around $50. To my knowledge these drives are all some form of e-waste, coming from unsold laptops or other weird places (mostly Asia). Basically the drives inside these devices weren't initially intended to go into external drives and were salvaged from elsewhere. Because of this, it's a bit of a toss up if/how they'll work.

When it comes to buying pretty much anything, I generally try to follow these three rules:

1. Gambling is for chumps. (Spending money on tech that might not work is gambling)
2. I'd rather have nothing than have $#!%. (I'd rather have no drive than a broken drive)
3. Buying from scum is scummy. (Amazon is pretty much the worst of the worst)

I’d unfortunately break all three of these rules. I’m not happy about it either, but the money’s already been spent and I sure as hell won’t let Bezos keep it.

A lot of these drives have hardwired connection cables, meaning I wouldn’t be able to replace the cord if it got damaged or went bad. I also avoided any drive with an over-the-top decorated shell. Seriously, it’s crazy how much they dress these things up in order to convince people they’re not recycled parts. I think I saw a listing for a drive with RGB lighting. That’s how crazy the market for cheap drives is.

I added my basic plastic box with USB-B port to my cart and paid for shipping. I then proceeded to forget about it for the next month until I eventually came home for spring break.

If you’re familiar with older games that required cartridges or discs in order to work, you’re probably familiar with the term “region-lock”. Essentially, region locking is when a company formats their media in such a way that it can only be played back on hardware that is sold specifically in that region.

The Nintendo Gamecube, for example, is a region-locked device. They are specifically programmed to not play games that originate outside their region, meaning that an American Gamecube can’t play a Japanese copy of Paper Mario.

The kicker? It can still read the disc, and it’s hardware is 100% capable of playing the game. The only thing stopping you from playing a Japanese game on an American Gamecube is some code in the console’s BIOS. Some smart people have even been able to load their own firmware to completely remove this restriction.

The same thing is true for movies and disc drives. If you’ve ever looked on the back of a movie box, you’ve probably noticed a handful of different symbols towards the bottom. Assuming you’re in the United States, your movies probably all have a little Earth symbol with a “1” printed on it. That’s the disc’s DVD region code, meaning that it can only be played on a drive that’s also region 1.

Like the case with the Gamecube, most disc readers are capable of reading discs from any region, they’re just programmed not to. In my case, my drive was set to region 2, and wasn’t initially capable of playing any of my movies. I had to access the device’s properties in my control panel and manually change the region.

This was a process that the drive can only perform a limited number of times, ever. Even if I plugged the drive into another computer, I would still only have 3 region changes left to use. Once I change the region on the drive too many times, it’s locked from changing its region ever again. This is another pointless firmware limitation that people have bypassed on other drives, just like in the case of the Gamecube.

Unfortunately, no one has bothered to create custom firmware for my obscure, up-cycled junk drive. Thankfully, I only have movies in DVD region 1, but it’s still frustrating to think my device which is perfectly capable of playing movies from all over the world is basically locked out of playing them.

So here’s the big question: If my hardware is capable of playing media from different regions, why isn’t it able to? Why are there all of these weird and obtuse restrictions on what device can read what media?

The answer: corruption and corporate greed. Region locking exists purely so that media companies have the ability to make stupid, anti-consumer decisions in the name of making more money. Media will sometimes be priced differently in different regions, and the ability to import/export cheaper films might hurt profits. It can prevent competition between different distributors, as having a license to sell movies in a region often gives companies a monopoly on that film within their licensed region. Perhaps worst of all, region-locking is also used as a form of censorship, making it difficult to watch or otherwise access media in a country where certain forms of information are illegal.

Point is, region-locking is stupid. I’m really glad that there aren’t any other scummy methods of making it harder for users to watch m-

Technically, region-locking is a form of DRM, though it’s not the only method companies use to make it harder to engage with media.

For all practical purposes, a DVD or Blu-Ray isn’t really any different from a USB drive or hard drive. It’s just a medium for data storage. In a perfect world, you would be able to put any DVD or Blu-Ray into any drive and access all of the information without the need for special software. Unfortunately, things aren’t that simple.

Most DVDs and Blu-Rays are encrypted by default. This means that they can only be read by drives with the correct firmware, and they can only be run on machines with the right codecs. If you’ve ever put a DVD into your laptop only to find that it can’t play out of the box, it’s because your computer doesn’t have the proper software to play DVDs, even if it could read un-encrypted discs just fine.

If you’ve been using this blog as a tutorial for watching movies on your laptop, my first question would be how you’ve made it this far without clicking off ot go read a reddit thread or something. But, if you’re still here, here are some software that can interact with physical media:

VLC Media Player is a free, open-source software that can be used to play DVDs and Blu-Rays on your desktop computer. If you’re just looking to watch a movie from a disc and don’t care about making digital backups, VLC is perfect. It can also be used to load all sorts of image and video files, so it’s a great alternative to your computer’s built in photos / video app. While it can’t make backups of movies, it can make backups of music CDs, a process which is perfectly legal so long as it’s used for personal use.

MakeMKV is a bit of a tricky one. While VLC is easy and straightforward, MakeMKV is a little bit… messy. At the time of writing, MakeMKV is in open beta and is completely free to use, though you will have to input a registration key in order for it to work. These keys are only good for one month at a time, at the end of which you’ll have to visit the forums to get a new one. Alternatively, you can set your computer’s clock back each time you want to use it, but that’s not exactly ideal. You can also purchase a permanent registration key, but if you’re a cheapskate like I am, that’s never gonna happen. Why is it like this? IDK, probably because once the software is out of beta the devs will start charging people, but it’s been in development for like a decade at this point.

MakeMKV does two things. First, it makes backups of discs. This means it will create a “virtual copy” of the disc that can be opened and interacted with as though you had a physical disc in your disc drive. The file is usually saved with a .iso file extension and can be opened with VLC. This is a good option if you want to preserve the entirety of the disc with things like menus and special features.

Second: It can decrypt the files and save them as .mkv files (hence the name “make mkv”). This is a good option if you plan on putting the media on a server or copy it to other devices, as .mkv files can be opened like any other video file.

Now, this part is why I felt it necessary to include the disclaimer at the beginning of this page. While it is perfectly legal to own a copy of the MakeMKV software on your device, the act of copying or decrypting a DRM-protected piece of media is technically a violation of copyright law. It’s like owning a hammer. Sure, you could use it to bash in all your neighbor’s windows, but simply owning it isn’t enough to land you in jail. My point is, if you ever decide to download MakeMKV, don’t use it.

Do not use MakeMKV to make backups of your physical media. Do not use software like Jellyfin to create your own media server with remote access to all of your movies. Do not donate the discs to your local library once you’re finished making backups.

When I first started writing this post, it started off as a private DM between friends. Once I started typing the third paragraph, I realized that I actually had a lot more to say about this topic than I first thought. Then I remembered I hadn’t updated my website’s blog page in a year and a half and well… you get the picture.

If you’re still reading, I hope that this rabbit hole was as interesting to you as it was to me. Owning physical media is awesome. Getting more out of the things you own is awesome. Being self reliant from streaming services is awesome. Go out, buy an external DVD player, download VLC and MakeMKV, and be awesome.

Shoutout to my pal Hoykaman for helping me proofread this. Love ya buddy <3