Speaking of Lisa Melton, she’s the creator of the fantastic Video Transcoding command-line tools, which I used for years to rip purchased Blu-ray and DVD discs so we can easily watch them on Apple TV via Plex. Her scripts (which she completely rewrote this year) saved me countless hours of fiddling with finicky commands. I’m very thankful for her and her work.

(She also started the Safari and WebKit projects at Apple. So you’re probably thankful for her and her work, too.)

My video ripping setup is ancient: I built it in 2016, powered by an Intel Mac mini and a pair of (now surprisingly expensive) LG Blu-ray drives ($48 then, $92 today). I tore it down when I moved in 2022 and bought an M1 Mac mini shortly after in anticipation of a rebuild—which never materialized. If I did a rebuild today, I’d likely trade in that barely used M1 for an M4 Mac mini, for both speed and compactness.

Of course, in this Golden Age of streaming, there’s less of a need to rip media—most of what we watch is readily available through any one of the many services to which we subscribe. Most Blu-ray discs now come with a digital streaming code (very handy!). But as beloved TV shows and movies disappear from the internet with alarming regularity, it’s comforting to know I can watch, for free, the dozens (hundreds?) of videos sitting on my Plex server—many of which aren’t available for streaming anywhere.

That’s the benefit of buying (and ripping) your media: you never have to worry about it going away because “the rights expired” or some such drivel. I had a minor scare recently when my Apple TV showed that Star Trek: The Next Generation—which I’m watching for the first time!—wouldn’t be available for streaming in the coming weeks, while I still had two and a half seasons to go! Fortunately it turned out to be departing from a different streamer (Pluto, not Paramount+) but I immediately priced out the boxed set—it was a timely reminder of why I prefer buying physical media for any content I care about.

(When I can, that is. I’m hot that I still can’t buy a Hamilton 4K Blu-ray: it’s only available on Disney+. I fear Disney will one day pull it from its platform and stick it in “the vault”.)

Lisa’s tools have helped rip dozens of discs and thousands of hours of video. When I (eventually) rebuild my setup, her tools will again be the brains of the operation.