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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2025

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  • The magic comes from hardware more than software, as others have mentioned you want a good burner to do the rips.

    Sorry for the rabbit hole, but media archival is its own can of worms that would take hours to dive into, so in general you want an Asus DVD drive that’s internal, manufactured between 2004 and 2010, supports 52x CD speeds, doesn’t have light scribe, and has the DVD-RW logo on the front bezel. Those are usually the magic drives, and you are generally going to need modified firmware to do some of the more bizarre reads. The Asus BW-16D1HT does Blu-ray and multi region discs, for just DVDs look for one of the DRW-**** drives without light scribe (they have a laser assembly that is higher power to write with, but usually doesn’t have as clean of a signal in exchange, not the best for rips)

    From there the software depends on your specific workflow. If you are just trying to recover clean disc rips then dd or ddrescue are going to be your friend. Get a disc image, mount it, use the data from the image instead of the disc. For archiving just the media look into MakeMKV, FFMPEG, and Handbrake for ways to encode the DVDs and audio into friendlier formats. Ffmpeg specifically can be scripted very easily and does audio just as well as video, it is the gold standard for transcoding media.



  • Reddragon, and just pull parts from goodwill mice, they send you extra Teflon pads with the mouse so you can open it and keep the pads nice. Switches are just switches, they are standard sizes, and the cords usually use standard plugs, worst case you swap some pins around to match. Insanely easy to take apart, and cheap enough to not worry about breaking.

    They are cheap as hell, but they have good tracking sensors and are really comfortable to use.


  • Second best. The best is actually the reddragon one that’s $20 on Amazon.

    I have used every mmo mouse on the market (currently on a scimitar elite, it’s the one op has but silver not yellow) and they are all decent mice, but each has a fatal flaw except the reddragon.

    G600 click switches are awful and double click after weeks of use, I had to replace them twice, the final time with the switches out of the red dragon. That was fine for close to 10 years, but the side key caps fall off, they are barely glued on.

    The scimitar has an awful encoder on the scroll wheel, I had to open the mouse to pack it with Vaseline to get it working properly, and disassembling the scimitar is a nightmare.

    The reddragon has bad software, but it’s also supported by open source options for remapping and RGB, so it’s one flaw was by far the easiest to fix.

    The g600 was the most comfortable to palm, but the side keys are in an awkward spot to palm the mouse, the scimitar is nice for the adjustable keypad, but it moves with time and tightening it too much will break the mouse. The red dragon has an odd texture on the far side, very rough, but otherwise the best for a claw grip.