- 295
- IGN
- videogamesm12
Growing frustrated with the rise of streaming services which do nothing but fuck the consumer over, starting in November 2023 I began to find ways to buy, own, and liberate the media I was consuming or intended to consume so that in a few months or even years from now, the same content I paid good money for years ago would continue to work unhindered without any extra bullshit. This thread aims to document my knowledge with liberating a media library, divided into sections based on the kinds of media being consumed in question as each type has their own process to go through.
The community of liberating optical media have chosen very specific drives on the market which are capable of being this way, though it seems that the best drives for the job of liberating them have since been removed from the market or otherwise updated to prevent LibreDrive from working. Some people offer drives in the community which have been pre-modified and while I was tempted to go this route, I ended up purchasing drives of my own and installing the modified firmware myself for a reduced price and just to cut out the middleman in the scenario. I ended up going with these drives:
When it comes to liberating them, CDs are a unique case because for a lot of people, they were the backbone of their digital media collection in the 2000s and part of making it part of their collection was by doing pretty much the same thing as you would to liberate them. However, the choice in software differs greatly. By design, Windows Media Player and iTunes do not losslessly rip CDs because they were designed for user convenience, not preservation. For this purpose, you need to use software intended for this purpose.
The next pages will explain the differences in formats and compression schemes and ask you which one to use. Select FLAC as that will preserve the quality the best and does not use Microsoft's retarded proprietary WMA format. The next page will ask you how you want to structure your music storage. You can choose whatever you want here, but I personally chose
With some of the foundational configuration work done, we now need to tune EAC to add metadata to our CDs when we rip them. In the menu bar, go to EAC -> Metadata Options and set the Selected metadata provider to MusicBrainz Metadata Plugin. This will instruct EAC to use MusicBrainz as the database to use for reference when getting metadata. Click OK. Back to the menu bar, go to EAC -> EAC Options and in the window that pops up, go to the General tab and check "On unknown CDs", then set the option to the right to be "automatically access online metadata database". Click OK.
When you insert a disk on a drive it's never seen before, it may ask you to configure AccurateRip using the disc. Select configure, as this is a countermeasure by a lot of CD ripping software focused on accuracy to ensure that regardless of the differences and general imperfections between different drives, the end result will still be the same. It will automatically figure out your drive's offset and work from there. The program may also ask you to find cover art, so click yes. It will prompt you with a window titled CD Cover Art Downloader. Click "Large Images", then double click the best looking one. You should now have the metadata and can start ripping.
In the main window, click the illustration with the "CMP" text. It will ask you where to put the music, so just select your Music folder and click OK. It will now rip the CD. Once it's done, you're pretty much good to go and can repeat the process with another disk if you want.
First thing you need to do is figure out your drive's offset. This is a measure that CD ripping software focused on accuracy use to make sure that when it stops at a specific spot on the disc, it's the exact same every time. If you have one of the two drives I listed above, the offset is +6. If you have any other drive, you will have to look it up using this page. Insert the CD into your optical drive, and open a terminal window to run the following command:
This will begin the rip and when it's done you'll have a folder containing the music as FLACs. Some CDs may not have entries on MusicBrainz, so if necessary you can bypass metadata lookups by appending a
absolute wastes of oxygen parasites RIAA, that's piracy and we can't have people hurting the multi billion dollar industry. We need to think about the millionare executives, because with piracy they can't afford another yacht, how horrible.
Instead, I'm going to offer the alternative but more manual solution which is seeking out the albums or whatever on other platforms which allow you to buy DRM-free music where possible and download them from there. This is not an end-all solution and it has its own caveats when it comes to availability, but it is the most legal solution. To begin, go through your playlists and take note of the artist and the album in question. Once you have that all written down, look for the albums for sale on other platforms. Some artists are pretty cool and offer their music for purchase on Bandcamp, which is an excellent compromise of getting online digitally and purchasing them and owning them forever, and you don't even need a Bandcamp account to buy music from it. If Bandcamp isn't an option, try looking for an official release of the albums, whether it be from a merch store or the more traditional brick and mortar store. The benefit to this solution is that you're supporting the artists more directly and should you find everything, can stick the music onto your phone or other device and listen to them whenever and however you want. The downsides is that you will need to effectively rebuild the playlists from scratch as many features in Spotify may not be present elsewhere.
These are what I've done for the past few years and in my opinion, avoiding Spotify like it's the plague has helped a lot with my overall listening experience and gives me much greater control of how and where I listen to my music. Zero ads and I don't pay a damn subscription to do it.
Something worth noting is that even if you don't think you have anything to liberate, then you should absolutely double check. If you grew up in the 2000s, chances are your family probably already has a sizeable collection of films on DVD that you can start with. If not, the second hand market has become an extremely lucrative and cheap as shit way to build up a library of amazing films and TV shows for cheap. Sites like eBay are guaranteed to offer something you might be interested in on DVD or Blu-ray. This is how I started my journey back in 2022 as a testing ground: using my desktop computer's DVD drive to liberate films I had lying around the house.
When liberating optical media, you need to find software that can get the job done without issue. I personally recommend a freeware program called MakeMKV, which allows you to take an optical disc and convert its contents losslessly to the royalty-free MKV format. The program is freeware and when going for some of the higher quality formats like Blu-ray or HD-DVD, you may need to get a registration key for it. If you want to get a permanent key that will work forever, you can purchase it by going onto the website and working from there. If not and you're fine with periodically changing every month or so, you can get a free temporary key that expires at the end of every month by going to this specific thread on their forums. After entering a key, restart the program and it should be business as usual.
Once installed, opening MakeMKV will present you with a graphical user interface that looks like this. It should automatically recognize the optical drives you have and give you various details about the drive and the disk in it (if any), as shown below. If a disk has been recognized, the illustration of a disk inside the drive will act as the button to begin the process. Click it to begin.
The program will begin to read the disk on the drive and build up a sort of list of all the "titles" on the disk (sort of like tracks on a CD) and remove any duplicates where possible. This may take some time depending on the disk and the drive, but eventually you'll end up at a screen presenting you with a list of titles it found and basically asks which ones you want to convert and where you want the converted files to go to. Depending on what kind of media you're ripping (as in if it's a TV show or a movie), the track list will differ significantly. By default, all titles are selected but you can and should uncheck the ones you don't want and work from there. To get further information about a given title, click it in the list and the right side panel should include some various details about the title including duration and such. Choosing which titles to include effectively will require some consideration, guesswork, and knowledge of the capacity of the format you're working with. DVDs can only take up to 8.5 GB of space, Blu-ray disks can only take up to ~50 GB, and 4K UHD Blu-ray disks can only take up to like 100 GB. I've included examples of what the screen should look like for both TV shows and movies for you to use as reference.
If you are working with movies, sometimes it's more obvious which title contains the movie and which doesn't based on the file size alone and the program may even annotate the title with something like "MainFeature" to point out which one has the movie. However, you will sometimes encounter curveballs that will throw you off. If you encounter a disk with multiple feature-length titles, it's either an additional protection measure by people mastering the disc or a consequence of your disc supporting multiple languages. Generally, these are your solutions for the former and latter:
Once you have selected the tracks you want to liberate, set the path where your converted files will go in the section to the right. I have a hard drive dedicated to storing all my liberated films, so I tend to just create a folder with the name of the show or movie and then set the path to that folder. You don't need to do this and the program will usually try to pick a path that makes the most sense for you. At this point, you should be done and can click the "Make MKV" button. The program will begin to read the disk and decrypt the titles you selected. This will take a considerable bit of time as you would expect, so you might want to do something else while you're waiting. It typically takes like an hour or so to get through a feature film in 4K UHD, so you may want to do something in the background while you wait. Once it's done, you can navigate to the folder containing the MKV file and do pretty much anything you want with it from that point onward. Most devices these days have built-in media players that support the MKV format, including the Xbox One, but some will struggle with the higher resolutions like 4K UHD due to hardware limitations.
Some software may come with DRM that may inhibit the process of imaging the optical disks or make the 1:1 copy unusable. Should you encounter this, you may need to download a crack for that piece of software online which removes these checks. Downloading cracks for software you don't own is considered piracy, and you should absolutely not do that. Again, you don't want to hurt the multi billion dollar software industry.
You will be presented with a menu that has quite a bit of details, but all you really need to do at this point is optionally change the destination (a task that can be accomplished by pressing the folder icon next to the current file path and browsing to a place to put the ISO file) and click the illustration representing the action you are about to perform. The bottom window acts as a sort of log detailing how things are going and if there's anything that requires your attention. It is also smart enough automatically detect when a disk needs to be saved in the BIN-CUE formats and work from there.
That's pretty much it. When it's done, it'll play a nice little jingle that may scare the shit out of you, but other than that you're good to go and can now move onto the next disk. Since around Windows 10 or so, you can automatically mount ISO files by simply double clicking them in the Windows Explorer. If you need to use a version of Windows earlier than that, a program I like to use called WinCDEmu allows you to do pretty much the same thing but works on Windows XP to I believe the latest version. To unmount the disk image, just right click the mounted drive and click "Eject".
Most Linux distributions include the GNU Core Utilities which includes an extremely handy command-line application called dd. This tool allows you to not only make a byte-by-byte copy of a file, but also a byte-by-byte copy of entire disks. It is an extremely powerful program when put in the right hands, but if you don't know what you're doing you could cause some actual damage. The first thing you need to do is figure out which device is your optical drive, and this can be accomplished with the
In this case, the optical drive is listed as
This command, when unmodified, will tell your computer to effectively read the entire device of sr0 and pipe it to the output file of filename.iso and while it's doing that, give you a visual representation of the progress it has made so far while reading the disk. Once done, you have effectively made a 1:1 digital copy of the disk. To use this digital copy and have your computer treat it as if you inserted a new optical drive with the disk installed, you will need to mount it using something like this:
To unmount it, just use this command:
This command will instruct your computer to read the entire disk raw and send the resulting data to two files, a BIN and a CUE file. These files must be kept together as you cannot have one without the other. To mount them like before and have your computer access them as if they were a CD drive, you will need to follow the guide noted in the answers of this support page. Otherwise, just leave them be as some software may not like being converted.
Click it to begin the next stage, where it decrypts and copies the game's data to the folder on your disk. Once it's done, it'll verify the validity of what it just copied with a known good copy and finish. At this point you can either swap disks and repeat the cycle or close the program. You can now either copy the dumped game to your modified system's hard disk using FTP or you can play the game on your computer using the RPCS3 emulator.
If you are going to liberate games with from the physical disk, follow the guide detailed here. I haven't liberated my physical games with more recent techniques because at some point within the last few years my system's Blu-ray drive stopped reading games. I used multiMAN to create ISO files for my games at the time.
If you are liberating games that were installed onto your console digitally, just navigate to the folder
Note #2: Make sure you have enough space on your SD card to hold the games you liberate.
Unsurprisingly, you need a modified console to liberate games in this department. To do this, follow the guide linked here. It will teach you how to install custom firmware and more importantly, Godmode9. This tool allows you to browser your system's filesystem and, in our case, get a digital, DRM-free copy of our cartridges. To start, turn your system off. Then, while holding the START button, press the power button to turn the system on. Once it reaches the Godmode9 menu, release the START button. You should now be in the navigational menu for Godmode9, as shown below.
Select the software you want to dump and in the menu that pops up select
As shown below, You will be given the option to do additional options (which includes building an installable
If you would like to transfer your save data as well, repeat the process with the
Note #2: While it is possible to use a USB loader like USB Loader GX to dump games, those don't make 1:1 backups as they tend to exclude unused data, making them pretty much useless if you intend to use them to research the games for sites like The Cutting Room Floor.
On your computer, check which file system format the disk you want your liberated games to be stored on is and write it down. This will be important later. Copy the homebrew application known as CleanRip onto your SD card or USB drive. This tool allows you to create 1:1 backups of your games using your original disks and it will create an ISO of that game's data. Download and extract the Redump DAT files for both the Wii and GameCube to the root directory of the SD card or USB drive you intend to send the dumps to. Rename the extracted files to wii.dat and gc.dat for the respective systems. These are basically databases of metadata for every known Wii and GameCube game with a reliable dump containing the name, its size, and its hashes in CRC, SHA-1, and MD5 forms. They are used by CleanRip to verify the integrity of the data it dumps.
Now that you've got that out of the way, insert the SD card or USB drive into their respective ports and launch CleanRip from the Homebrew Channel. Upon launching it and getting past the disclaimers, you will be asked if you want to enable checksum calculations. This basically means the system will perform integrity checks on the data after the rip is complete to make sure it's correct, and I personally think that's a good idea so select Yes.
You will then be asked to specify whether you're going to be sending your dumps to an SD card or USB drive and what file system it's formatted with. Since you wrote down what your destination drive's file system is, you don't need to do any guesswork as you can just select the one you wrote down. In my case, I went with my SD card which was formatted as FAT32, as shown below. You'll be told to insert whatever it is and if it's already connected, you can just press A to continue. You will then be prompted to check for updated redump.org DAT files, but since you already have the latest database you can select "No".
You will then be asked to put a game into the disk slot (if not done already) and to press A to begin. It will begin preparations to start dumping the game, but it's still got some questions for you. If you are dumping a Wii game, an additional menu will pop up asking you if the game is on a double-layered disk (by default, it's set to "auto" which means it will detect it for you), how much data it should fit into a single file before splitting it up into another chunk, and whether to use a new device per chunk. I have shown my settings below which creates only two chunks (or none if the destination is not using FAT32) and uses the same disk for both chunks. Once the settings are set to your liking, press A to continue. You will be asked if the disk is an unauthorized disk made by Datel (the company behind the Action Replay amongst other early unauthorized software), but select No. It'll ask you if you want it to remember your settings for next time, and whether to do this is entirely up to you. It will then begin reading and dumping the disk.
Once complete, you should now have the chunks on the root directory of whatever you chose to throw the dumps onto. If you want you can repeat the cycle with other games as well. If your destination card/drive was formatted to the FAT32 file system or you chose to use multiple chunks, there will be multiple ISO files with
Note #3: The first part of the file name (with the one noted below being RQOE69) is the internal ID for the game you dumped. Only combine files with the same internal ID.
The files generated by using the settings above to rip Spore Hero. This was done on an SD card formatted as FAT32, so it still got split up into chunks.
If you are running Windows, modify this command to fit your situation and run it:
If you are running Linux, modify this command to fit your situation and run it. Even if part 2, part 3, and part 4 don't exist, it'll still work just fine.
Now you're done. You can load these ISOs into the Dolphin Emulator or do basically whatever you want with it. In order to load this backup onto the system, you either need to burn it to a DVD and install a modchip into your system's DVD drive or stick it on a USB hard drive (or something similar) and load it in with USB Loader GX, which requires the installation of custom IOSes to use.
You'll then be sent to a menu giving you a choice between various types of channels. Each type has their own purpose and reason to exist. "System Titles" are used for internal stuff like IOS versions and System Menu versions, "Disc Savedata" is mostly just savedata in games loaded from physical media, "Installed Channel Titles" are WiiWare and homebrew applications, "System Channel Titles" are just pre-instaleld channels like the News Channel and the Forecast Channel, "Games that use Channels (Channel+Save)" are channels provided by games like Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii, and "Hidden Channels" are more internal channels that really shouldn't be fucked with. Choose the type of channels you want to dump by navigating to the option and pressing A. You will be presented with a scrollable list of channels it found matching that type. Pick the channel that you want to dump by navigating to it and pressing the 1 button on your Wii Remote (or Y button if using a GameCube controller). A menu should appear asking you to select what to do. Use the D-Pad to navigate to the option to backup the channel to a WAD and press A.
You will be given a series of questions about whether you want to fakesign the "ticket" and "TMD" and if you want to change the region of the resulting WAD file. The guides I've read have had conflicting answers to these questions. Dolphin's wiki says to say no to all of them, while the Wii hacking guide says to say yes to fakesign the ticket, but no for everything else. Feel free to choose which one to follow but I'd personally recommend just saying no to everything like Dolphin said. It will then begin to package it up into a WAD file. If it fails to access the very first content file, then chances are the game is either somehow missing important files or is located on an SD card. Once it completes, you will be given the file path to the WAD file and asked to press any button to go back to the channel list. If you want, you can repeat the process for other channels to dump them as well or dump your save data for that by doing the the same thing above but instead going with the options to dump the save data instead.
Congratulations, you've liberated your Wii save data and installed channels. You can install them in the Dolphin Emulator or other consoles.
For this, we are going to need to install an application called Calibre, which you can get here. It is a free and open source eBook manager program, though that's not what we're going to install this for. This program alone cannot liberate eBooks, but we can install a plugin that does. Once Calibre is installed, we will need to install additional plugins called DeDRM and Obok, which you can get here. Once you download the latest release's ZIP file, extract the ZIP files that are inside it to your Downloads folder. Open Calibre and click Preferences, then click "Plugins" in the window that pops up. Click "Load plugin from file" and select the ZIP files you just extracted.
Now, this still isn't enough to begin liberating eBooks, we have just established the foundation. The process is different between services as they usually use different means of keeping control to themselves, so I've split the known ways up into sections of their own.
ACSM files are not the book themselves, they're set of instructions for ADE to download the actual eBook, so we'll need to have it installed on your computer. Install the ADE desktop application onto your computer and log in with your Adobe account, then open the ACSM file with ADE. When it shows up in your bookshelf list, that means it finished downloading. On Windows, it will be located at
You've now imported them into Calibre, but you're not done yet. Move onto the Converting the eBooks in Calibre to EPUB files section below and follow the steps from there.
Liberating books from Kindle is one hell of an undertaking and a process that is annoyingly complicated, especially compared to Audible audiobooks. The process depends on the operating systems and the hardware you have on hand. We will need to install an additional plugin called "KFX Input", which you can get here. Follow the steps above but with KFX Input instead, minus the extraction part as that's not necessary here.
If you have the Kindle for PC app installed on your computer, verify that it's running a version earlier than 1.26 and if it isn't, uninstall it. Download and run the installer for v1.26 of the desktop application from here. Once installed, do not log into your Amazon account just yet. Go to the menu bar and select Tools, then go to Options. A settings menu will come up in the general page. Unselect "Automatically install updates when they are available without asking me" and click Save.
Relaunch the application and log into your Amazon account. From there, you will be able to see your library of books on Kindle. Right click the books you want to liberate and click "Download". Once it finishes downloading, the book will have a checkmark overlay on the bottom right corner of the cover. All Kindle books downloaded will be located in their own dedicated folder in
Note #4: We will be using a very old version of Kindle for Android for this, so some books may not even work properly for this approach.
Android users can install a very old version of Kindle for Android which, when paired with the Android Debug Bridge, will allow you to extract the keys needed to download and liberate your Kindle library. To begin, make sure that Kindle for Android is not already installed on your mobile device and if it is, uninstall it. To begin, enable developer settings (if you haven't already) on your device by following this guide. Once you're done, you should now get an option to go into developer settings. From here, scroll down until you get the option to enable USB debugging. If it's turned off, turn it on.
On your computer, download the Android SDK Platform Tools from the Android developer website here for your respective platform and extract the executables somewhere. Open the command prompt or terminal and navigate to the folder where you just extracted everything. Plug your phone into your computer via USB. To verify that things are working, run the command below (adding a
If no devices were found or it is asking about pending authorization, wake your device up and unlock it. A prompt should come up asking if you want to enable USB debugging. Select "Yes" or "Allow". At this point, try running the command again. This time, the command should return something. If you are running BlueStacks, you must explicitly enable USB debugging in its advanced settings and then connect to it with something like
Download Kindle for Android v4.16.0.75 from OldVersion.com here and stick it into the same folder where you are running ADB from. Back at the command line, run this command to install it onto your device:
If it fails with the error
The resulting file (named
Another window will come up showing a blank list of keys. Click the green + symbol to open a window, which will prompt you to choose the backup file you dumped earlier. Once you've chosen the backup file, give the key a unique name, then click OK. At this point you can close the settings windows and begin to liberate your books. On your device, go back to the Kindle app and download the desired books by simply tapping their cover. Books will be indicated as downloaded by a checkmark overlay at the bottom right corner of the cover. They will be located on the device's internal storage at
At this point, importing them should be as easy as clicking and dragging the files into Calibre. It will hopefully decrypt the books. You've now imported them into Calibre, but you're not done yet. Move onto the Converting the eBooks in Calibre to epub files section below and follow the steps from there.
Calibre will the begin to convert the book to the more traditional EPUB-formatted file, which may take some time depending on the book. If you want to see how far along it is, click the text at the bottom right corner of the program mentioning "Jobs". A window will come up telling you what it's doing, the status, how far along it is in doing that, how long it's been doing it, and when you told it to do it. Once complete, the converted files will be in wherever Calibre is configured to put the books, which is by default set to
Congratulations, your eBooks have been liberated.
To begin, download the free and open source application known as Libation from its official GitHub page and run it. You will be asked whether or not you're a new user or one returning from an upgrade. Obviously, you pick the "New User" option. It will then ask you if you want to take a tour of the application, click Yes as this will basically show you how to use the application and import your audiobooks. As you follow the quick start guide, you will be asked to log into your Amazon account. If you use Two Factor Authentication, use the more advanced approach where you click a URL and log in through the Amazon website. Once you've gone through the quick start guide, it should begin to download and liberate your audiobooks but if not, go to Liberate in the menu bar and click "Liberate Visible Books". After it finishes, the now liberated audiobooks will be somewhere in your music folder, for me it was in
Each book is stored in the M4B format, but if you want the program can be configured to convert them to MP3s by going to Settings -> Settings and going to the Audio File Settings tab, then selecting "Download my books as .MP3 files (transcode if necessary)". Since MP3 is not a lossless format, some information will be lost when during the transcoding process, so keep that in mind. Programs like VLC are capable of natively playing back the M4B files so chances are converting to MP3 isn't always necessary. With that, you're done.
You may see subscription services as a better bang for your buck because you get access to a huge selection of shows or games, but in exchange for the cheaper price you are actively paying in another form of currency: control. Some people value convenience and lower costs over that, but eventually the inconveniences of requiring an internet connection, getting screwed over by bad or problematic DRM schemes which hurt you and not the pirates, having to pay more per month every few months to fulfill some rich dickhead's wish for a thirteenth yacht, or even just not being able to access a piece of content that you used to be able to just fine just a few short years ago will come back to bite you in the ass. Why? Because you never truly owned the content you were paying for in the first place, you just owned an account that could be used to access them. Even then, they will still find a way to fuck you over.
I hope this thread serves as a guide for those seeking to go on the same journey I underwent to regain control of the shit you pay for, as a lot of this stems from my own personal anecdotal experiences. If you have anything to contribute to this or even just have any questions, don't be afraid to chime in with a reply of your own.
Introduction
"Liberating" media can best be described by a step-by-step process in which I legally acquire a high quality copy of a given piece of media and then use software to remove any unwanted inconveniences that may hinder its usability on older/newer/era-appropriate hardware that are otherwise capable of playing it. This is not piracy, where you'd be downloading a copy of something from the internet. The benefits of liberated media become apparent once you have some and compare them to the streaming services of today, and I'll list some examples below:- By having a liberated copy of the media, you are guaranteed the practical ownership of it. You can downscale or even upscale the content in question using standard software like Handbrake so that you can shrink the file size and compress them yourself. You can also easily migrate the media by just copying the file to your device or storage media. This means that even if the original hardware or medium has deteriorated since the liberation process, the digital liberated version will continue to function for as long as you want.
- Much like physical media itself, liberated media does not have a need or even an interest in accessing the internet and depending on how it's encoded, will work perfectly fine on practically anything. You may not think this is so important now if you live in an area with an excellent internet connection, but I recently had to stay at a place where the internet coverage even on mobile data was extremely spotty at best and downright useless at worst. It was because of the collection of liberated media I had amassed prior that I was able to still watch episodes of SpongeBob and all that on a TV buffer-free without any bullshit.
- With liberated media, you aren't bound to as many sketchy terms of services that many big companies would put to absolve themselves of any responsibility for any gross negligence they practice years from now. Disney tried to argue that by signing up for a trial of Disney+, you can't sue them after your partner dies from allergies because of their own gross negligence at Disney World. The only reason they backpedaled on this was because of the extreme backlash they received. It could happen to you. Don't give them the bone to do that for your own sake.
The community of liberating optical media have chosen very specific drives on the market which are capable of being this way, though it seems that the best drives for the job of liberating them have since been removed from the market or otherwise updated to prevent LibreDrive from working. Some people offer drives in the community which have been pre-modified and while I was tempted to go this route, I ended up purchasing drives of my own and installing the modified firmware myself for a reduced price and just to cut out the middleman in the scenario. I ended up going with these drives:
- ASUS BW-16D1HT: An internal 5.25" drive from ASUS. I actually bought this drive twice, first to replace the DVD drive in my desktop computer and then a second time when I built my second and now primary computer. It can rip both 4K and regular Blu-ray disks just fine, but because the drive doesn't really officially support 4K UHD out of the box, you may experience bugs like the drive failing to read the disk and making grinding noises if you leave the disk in there idle for too long. This is generally not an issue as you can just remove the disk and put it back in again. If that doesn't work, just reboot your computer. It is an excellent drive for what I use it for, though. You can get it here, going for about $99.
- Archgon MD-8107S-U3-UHD: An external slim drive From Archgon, which uses an LG BU40N for its drive. I bought this one because I wanted a portable drive for a trip I was planning on going on. Since then, the drive has been an absolute powerhouse and an excellent drive to use as a backup in the event the ASUS one fails for whatever reason. I highly recommend this drive, especially since it supports 4K UHD far better than the ASUS. You can get it here, going for about $126.89.
Music
Music is by far the easiest to liberate since for almost an entire decade it was already the definitive way for even casual users to listen to music on their computer. Releases come in different formats though and the process differs from format to format. While there are many other formats that I could talk about such as vinyl and cassettes, I don't have much experience with liberating those from their own inconveniences at this moment in time. I plan to get into those in due time, but I don't have the resources right now.Compact Discs (CDs)
Many in the audiophile community who like to justify their expensive purchases of vinyl records and very specific record players will take one look at the Compact Disc and blow it off saying that the fact it's digital is enough to completely ruin the sound quality for them, then proceed to invest in a record mastered entirely digitally and somehow see a difference in the quality. This is complete bullshit. Even still, the fact that a CD is not analog but rather digital makes it better because when you rip it properly, you are guaranteed to have a 1:1 byte-by-byte copy of the contents of the CD. This means that even if the disk completely deteriorates, the rip you will have means you can always burn a backup that sounds exactly the same. You sure as hell can't do that with vinyl.When it comes to liberating them, CDs are a unique case because for a lot of people, they were the backbone of their digital media collection in the 2000s and part of making it part of their collection was by doing pretty much the same thing as you would to liberate them. However, the choice in software differs greatly. By design, Windows Media Player and iTunes do not losslessly rip CDs because they were designed for user convenience, not preservation. For this purpose, you need to use software intended for this purpose.
If you are using Windows
Those who prefer a graphical user interface will like Exact Audio Copy, a free desktop application takes the CD, rips it, and then dumps the resulting files in a folder of your choice. When you open it for the first time, it will prompt you to configure the application in a series of steps, so begin by clicking Next. When it prompts you to make a choice between speed and accuracy, chooseI prefer to have accurate results. You'll then be asked to put a clean CD into the drive to detect various features of the drive, so do that and then click Next. After it finishes, it will explain to you the features that it found, so simply continue onward. The next pages will explain the differences in formats and compression schemes and ask you which one to use. Select FLAC as that will preserve the quality the best and does not use Microsoft's retarded proprietary WMA format. The next page will ask you how you want to structure your music storage. You can choose whatever you want here, but I personally chose
ABBA \ Number Ones \ 03 Dancing Queen as this is the structure that programs like iTunes use and it generally makes the most sense. At this point you should be done with the preliminary setup and can move onto getting metadata working.With some of the foundational configuration work done, we now need to tune EAC to add metadata to our CDs when we rip them. In the menu bar, go to EAC -> Metadata Options and set the Selected metadata provider to MusicBrainz Metadata Plugin. This will instruct EAC to use MusicBrainz as the database to use for reference when getting metadata. Click OK. Back to the menu bar, go to EAC -> EAC Options and in the window that pops up, go to the General tab and check "On unknown CDs", then set the option to the right to be "automatically access online metadata database". Click OK.
When you insert a disk on a drive it's never seen before, it may ask you to configure AccurateRip using the disc. Select configure, as this is a countermeasure by a lot of CD ripping software focused on accuracy to ensure that regardless of the differences and general imperfections between different drives, the end result will still be the same. It will automatically figure out your drive's offset and work from there. The program may also ask you to find cover art, so click yes. It will prompt you with a window titled CD Cover Art Downloader. Click "Large Images", then double click the best looking one. You should now have the metadata and can start ripping.
In the main window, click the illustration with the "CMP" text. It will ask you where to put the music, so just select your Music folder and click OK. It will now rip the CD. Once it's done, you're pretty much good to go and can repeat the process with another disk if you want.
If you are using Linux
I personally use a command-line tool called CyanRip. This tool is basically the Linux equivalent of Exact Audio Copy, offering many of the same features but most notably lacking any form of graphical user interface. With that said, I am going to work on the assumption that you are already somewhat familiar with the command line if you're using something that has as much of a close relationship to the terminal as me to data hoarding.First thing you need to do is figure out your drive's offset. This is a measure that CD ripping software focused on accuracy use to make sure that when it stops at a specific spot on the disc, it's the exact same every time. If you have one of the two drives I listed above, the offset is +6. If you have any other drive, you will have to look it up using this page. Insert the CD into your optical drive, and open a terminal window to run the following command:
Bash:
cyanrip -s 6This will begin the rip and when it's done you'll have a folder containing the music as FLACs. Some CDs may not have entries on MusicBrainz, so if necessary you can bypass metadata lookups by appending a
-N at the end, which will disable them entirely.Digital Music
Say you have Spotify and you want to migrate from that service to something you own and therefore control. While a bit iffy in today's climate, it can be done. A software library called Lucida (written in Typescript) can be utilized to download music from services like Tidal, Spotify, and Deezer, but this requires tokens or login credentials and a general knowledge of programming to use it. I have yet to use this library so I don't know exactly how to put it to good use yet. There are services which use libraries like this which totally don't have a name so nice you say the word twice, but according to theInstead, I'm going to offer the alternative but more manual solution which is seeking out the albums or whatever on other platforms which allow you to buy DRM-free music where possible and download them from there. This is not an end-all solution and it has its own caveats when it comes to availability, but it is the most legal solution. To begin, go through your playlists and take note of the artist and the album in question. Once you have that all written down, look for the albums for sale on other platforms. Some artists are pretty cool and offer their music for purchase on Bandcamp, which is an excellent compromise of getting online digitally and purchasing them and owning them forever, and you don't even need a Bandcamp account to buy music from it. If Bandcamp isn't an option, try looking for an official release of the albums, whether it be from a merch store or the more traditional brick and mortar store. The benefit to this solution is that you're supporting the artists more directly and should you find everything, can stick the music onto your phone or other device and listen to them whenever and however you want. The downsides is that you will need to effectively rebuild the playlists from scratch as many features in Spotify may not be present elsewhere.
These are what I've done for the past few years and in my opinion, avoiding Spotify like it's the plague has helped a lot with my overall listening experience and gives me much greater control of how and where I listen to my music. Zero ads and I don't pay a damn subscription to do it.
Movies and TV shows
As mentioned in a section above, if you want to liberate your movies and TV shows, there are a bunch of hoops to jump through first. I have already detailed the preliminary requirements necessary in terms of hardware, but like a limb you can't have a bone without muscle. I'm going to go through the various formats and explain the process for you.Something worth noting is that even if you don't think you have anything to liberate, then you should absolutely double check. If you grew up in the 2000s, chances are your family probably already has a sizeable collection of films on DVD that you can start with. If not, the second hand market has become an extremely lucrative and cheap as shit way to build up a library of amazing films and TV shows for cheap. Sites like eBay are guaranteed to offer something you might be interested in on DVD or Blu-ray. This is how I started my journey back in 2022 as a testing ground: using my desktop computer's DVD drive to liberate films I had lying around the house.
Optical Media (DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray)
Note: If you are planning on liberating 4K Ultra HD films or you encounter protection-related errors while trying to liberate standard Blu-ray disks, you will need to jailbreak the drive as mentioned before. Read the guide I linked above for more information.When liberating optical media, you need to find software that can get the job done without issue. I personally recommend a freeware program called MakeMKV, which allows you to take an optical disc and convert its contents losslessly to the royalty-free MKV format. The program is freeware and when going for some of the higher quality formats like Blu-ray or HD-DVD, you may need to get a registration key for it. If you want to get a permanent key that will work forever, you can purchase it by going onto the website and working from there. If not and you're fine with periodically changing every month or so, you can get a free temporary key that expires at the end of every month by going to this specific thread on their forums. After entering a key, restart the program and it should be business as usual.
Once installed, opening MakeMKV will present you with a graphical user interface that looks like this. It should automatically recognize the optical drives you have and give you various details about the drive and the disk in it (if any), as shown below. If a disk has been recognized, the illustration of a disk inside the drive will act as the button to begin the process. Click it to begin.
The program will begin to read the disk on the drive and build up a sort of list of all the "titles" on the disk (sort of like tracks on a CD) and remove any duplicates where possible. This may take some time depending on the disk and the drive, but eventually you'll end up at a screen presenting you with a list of titles it found and basically asks which ones you want to convert and where you want the converted files to go to. Depending on what kind of media you're ripping (as in if it's a TV show or a movie), the track list will differ significantly. By default, all titles are selected but you can and should uncheck the ones you don't want and work from there. To get further information about a given title, click it in the list and the right side panel should include some various details about the title including duration and such. Choosing which titles to include effectively will require some consideration, guesswork, and knowledge of the capacity of the format you're working with. DVDs can only take up to 8.5 GB of space, Blu-ray disks can only take up to ~50 GB, and 4K UHD Blu-ray disks can only take up to like 100 GB. I've included examples of what the screen should look like for both TV shows and movies for you to use as reference.
If you are working with movies, sometimes it's more obvious which title contains the movie and which doesn't based on the file size alone and the program may even annotate the title with something like "MainFeature" to point out which one has the movie. However, you will sometimes encounter curveballs that will throw you off. If you encounter a disk with multiple feature-length titles, it's either an additional protection measure by people mastering the disc or a consequence of your disc supporting multiple languages. Generally, these are your solutions for the former and latter:
- The community has devised a solution to work around this extra layer of protection and it's by using your system's installation of Java to emulate a Blu-ray player to guess which one is the main feature film track. If it works, as said before the correct title will usually be annotated with "FPL_MainFeature".
- If the lengths are different between the tracks, do some research online as for how long the film actually is and find the title that matches that the best.
- Trial and error is your best friend here. Just include all the titles and go through them afterwards to see which one is the correct language and title, then delete the rest.
- As a last resort, you can consult the MakeMKV forums in this board. Chances are, at least someone else has run into the issue you're facing and have gotten a solution.
Once you have selected the tracks you want to liberate, set the path where your converted files will go in the section to the right. I have a hard drive dedicated to storing all my liberated films, so I tend to just create a folder with the name of the show or movie and then set the path to that folder. You don't need to do this and the program will usually try to pick a path that makes the most sense for you. At this point, you should be done and can click the "Make MKV" button. The program will begin to read the disk and decrypt the titles you selected. This will take a considerable bit of time as you would expect, so you might want to do something else while you're waiting. It typically takes like an hour or so to get through a feature film in 4K UHD, so you may want to do something in the background while you wait. Once it's done, you can navigate to the folder containing the MKV file and do pretty much anything you want with it from that point onward. Most devices these days have built-in media players that support the MKV format, including the Xbox One, but some will struggle with the higher resolutions like 4K UHD due to hardware limitations.
Software
This section will cover software that came on optical media for simplicity's sake as preserving software digitally can be as easy as just copying the offline installer somewhere or as difficult as convincing the CEO of Adobe to switch to a perpetual license system or convincing Akefu Brewer to stop the raids. It is also really difficult to preserve a lot of software installed via installers as many of them nowadays are just online-only installers that download files and store them temporarily after you launch them. To liberate computer software stored on optical media, you need a program that is capable of making images out of disks, and this depends heavily on the operating system you are using.Some software may come with DRM that may inhibit the process of imaging the optical disks or make the 1:1 copy unusable. Should you encounter this, you may need to download a crack for that piece of software online which removes these checks. Downloading cracks for software you don't own is considered piracy, and you should absolutely not do that. Again, you don't want to hurt the multi billion dollar software industry.
If you are using Windows
Windows does not come with a disk imaging tool by default, so you will need a program that does this for you. While some people use PowerISO, I personally recommend ImgBurn because it is completely free, does not have any trialware bullshit, and works really well. You can download and install ImgBurn here. Once installed and launched, ImgBurn will present you with a few options in the form of a graphical user interface as shown below. Insert an optical disk and click on "Create image file from disc".You will be presented with a menu that has quite a bit of details, but all you really need to do at this point is optionally change the destination (a task that can be accomplished by pressing the folder icon next to the current file path and browsing to a place to put the ISO file) and click the illustration representing the action you are about to perform. The bottom window acts as a sort of log detailing how things are going and if there's anything that requires your attention. It is also smart enough automatically detect when a disk needs to be saved in the BIN-CUE formats and work from there.
That's pretty much it. When it's done, it'll play a nice little jingle that may scare the shit out of you, but other than that you're good to go and can now move onto the next disk. Since around Windows 10 or so, you can automatically mount ISO files by simply double clicking them in the Windows Explorer. If you need to use a version of Windows earlier than that, a program I like to use called WinCDEmu allows you to do pretty much the same thing but works on Windows XP to I believe the latest version. To unmount the disk image, just right click the mounted drive and click "Eject".
If you are using Linux, first approach
Note: You will likely need root access or at least sudo access to be able to make images of disks under Linux as without it, you may just get a permissions-related error. Chances are you already have this if you're doing this on your own computer.Most Linux distributions include the GNU Core Utilities which includes an extremely handy command-line application called dd. This tool allows you to not only make a byte-by-byte copy of a file, but also a byte-by-byte copy of entire disks. It is an extremely powerful program when put in the right hands, but if you don't know what you're doing you could cause some actual damage. The first thing you need to do is figure out which device is your optical drive, and this can be accomplished with the
lsblk command, which may return something like this:
Code:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
zram0 254:0 0 4G 0 disk [SWAP]
nvme0n1 259:2 0 931.5G 0 disksr0 as substantiated by the fact that it's the only "ROM" type in the output, so that means it can be accessed as /dev/sr0. Now, find a place to put where you want your imaged disk to go and set your terminal working directory to it. Then, execute this command with the filename and device path replaced with your equivalent:
Bash:
dd if=/dev/sr0 of=filename.iso status=progress
Bash:
sudo mkdir /media/iso
sudo mount /path/to/image.iso /media/iso -o loop
Bash:
sudo umount /media/isoIf you are using Linux, second approach
Some software disks (specifically CDs) may prove to be a bit tricky and will not work with thedd command. As an alternative, you can use a command-line tool called cdrdao. Depending on the distribution you may have to install it using your relevant package manager, usually just named cdrdao. Once installed, follow the first few steps in the first approach to get the device name of your optical drive and instead of running dd, run this command instead with the filename and device path replaced with your equivalents:
Bash:
cdrdao read-cd --read-raw --datafile "filename.bin" --device /dev/sr0 --driver generic-mmc-raw "filename.cue"Video Games
This one is a pretty tricky one to pull off. Most video game consoles are going to have at least something deterring you from being able to directly access the game data. As such, unless otherwise specified, you will need a modified/jailbroken console to liberate your games. Each console has their own steps, so this section is going to be separated by console based on what I personally know about liberating their games. This will be incomplete as I don't own or know every way to do this for various consoles, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to cover some of the more common bases. The sections are written with the expectation that you know how to install homebrew on a console or at least the very basics on how they operate in the modding scenes.PlayStation and PlayStation 2
When it comes to liberating games for the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, you don't actually need a console to do it as any computer with an optical drive can just read it. You can just follow the same steps listed above to do this and the result will be either an ISO file or a BIN and CUE file containing the game files, depending on the system and your operating system. The security model of these consoles mean that you will need to modify the system to accept your burned game backups, but system emulators, USB/HDD loaders, and optical drive emulators should have no problem with that.PlayStation 3
The PlayStation 3 is a bit of a tough cookie to liberate games for. If you do not have a Blu-ray drive on your own you will need to either have a modified console with has a working drive or buy a compatible drive for your computer. This will be split into separate sections depending on the approach you take to liberate the games. A real console will need to be jailbroken with CFW or HFW for it to accept liberated versions of games, but with emulators no such limitations are present.Using a computer with a Blu-ray drive
When using a computer with a Blu-ray drive, you will need to make sure that the drive you own is compatible and capable of reading game disks. You can do this by going to RPCS3's Quick Start guide and going to the section about compatible drives. The drives I listed above are perfectly capable of reading the disks so if you have one of those for other reasons they will work for you as well. Start by going to the GitHub page for the PS3 Disc Dumper, downloading the latest release, and extracting the zip file to a folder where you want your games to be stored. If you are running Linux, make sure that the executable has execution permissions, but I wasn't able to get the main program to work so your mileage may vary. Once the application starts it should automatically scan for any optical discs with games on them and should it find one, will begin the second stage in which it searches for keys it needs to decrypt the game data. When that's over with, you should get a button that says "Start", as shown below.Click it to begin the next stage, where it decrypts and copies the game's data to the folder on your disk. Once it's done, it'll verify the validity of what it just copied with a known good copy and finish. At this point you can either swap disks and repeat the cycle or close the program. You can now either copy the dumped game to your modified system's hard disk using FTP or you can play the game on your computer using the RPCS3 emulator.
Using a modified console
This method, for many people, will end up being the way to do it if you don't have a compatible drive. Your system will need to be modded and to do this, you can follow this guide by YouTube user MrMario2011 by clicking here. With your system modded, you can now liberate your games. To transfer files over FTP, install the webMAN MOD homebrew application. It will run every time you start your console and allow you to access a web panel to control your system.If you are going to liberate games with from the physical disk, follow the guide detailed here. I haven't liberated my physical games with more recent techniques because at some point within the last few years my system's Blu-ray drive stopped reading games. I used multiMAN to create ISO files for my games at the time.
If you are liberating games that were installed onto your console digitally, just navigate to the folder
/dev_hdd0/games/ over FTP and copy everything over to your computer. You get effectively the same end resulting files as the dumping method with the computer and a Blu-ray drive and thus should work just fine in the RPCS3 emulator.Nintendo 2DS/3DS
Note: This guide can also be used to liberate regular Nintendo DS games.Note #2: Make sure you have enough space on your SD card to hold the games you liberate.
Unsurprisingly, you need a modified console to liberate games in this department. To do this, follow the guide linked here. It will teach you how to install custom firmware and more importantly, Godmode9. This tool allows you to browser your system's filesystem and, in our case, get a digital, DRM-free copy of our cartridges. To start, turn your system off. Then, while holding the START button, press the power button to turn the system on. Once it reaches the Godmode9 menu, release the START button. You should now be in the navigational menu for Godmode9, as shown below.
Dumping software installed digitally
Press the HOME button to access the home menu, then select "Title manager". You will then be presented a choice between software installed on the SD card and software installed in the NAND. All in-built software and DSiWare are stored in the system NAND, while 3DS games and other general homebrew are stored on the SD card. Select the relevant one you are looking for. You will be presented with a list of all installed software in that area.Select the software you want to dump and in the menu that pops up select
Manage Title..., then Build CIA (standard). Your system will package up the game into an installable .cia package file (which can be then installed on other systems or in an emulator) and spit it onto the /gm9/out/ folder on your SD card. At this point, you're pretty much done and you can either repeat the process or restart your system by pressing the START button.Dumping cartridges
Select theGAMECART option. You will be sent to a menu listing files available for access on the game cartridge, including the game data and the save data on the cartridge. If you are copying a standard Nintendo DS game, select the file with the .nds file extension. Otherwise, select the file with the .trim.3ds file extension.As shown below, You will be given the option to do additional options (which includes building an installable
.cia package file out of it or installing it directly to the system if it's a Nintendo 3DS game), showing the file in a hex editor, calculating its hashes, showing information about the file, and (more importantly in our case) copying the file to the /gm9/out/ folder on your SD card. Select the option to copy the file and wait for it to finish.If you would like to transfer your save data as well, repeat the process with the
.sav file. Congratulations, you've now copied your cartridge's contents to your SD card in a format that most emulators should be able to accept. You can now remove the game cartridge and either repeat the process as noted above with another game or restart your system by pressing the START button.Nintendo GameCube and Wii
These two consoles have been consolidated into one section because the Wii is capable of reading both Wii and GameCube games, and given that the Wii sold about 4x as much as the GameCube, you're more likely to own a Wii than a GameCube. The first thing you will need to do is jailbreak your Wii if you haven't already. It's really easy to do, and you can read how to do this by going to this webpage and following the instructions.Dumping games from physical media
Note: You will need either a SD card or USB drive with plenty of free room to hold the game data.Note #2: While it is possible to use a USB loader like USB Loader GX to dump games, those don't make 1:1 backups as they tend to exclude unused data, making them pretty much useless if you intend to use them to research the games for sites like The Cutting Room Floor.
On your computer, check which file system format the disk you want your liberated games to be stored on is and write it down. This will be important later. Copy the homebrew application known as CleanRip onto your SD card or USB drive. This tool allows you to create 1:1 backups of your games using your original disks and it will create an ISO of that game's data. Download and extract the Redump DAT files for both the Wii and GameCube to the root directory of the SD card or USB drive you intend to send the dumps to. Rename the extracted files to wii.dat and gc.dat for the respective systems. These are basically databases of metadata for every known Wii and GameCube game with a reliable dump containing the name, its size, and its hashes in CRC, SHA-1, and MD5 forms. They are used by CleanRip to verify the integrity of the data it dumps.
Now that you've got that out of the way, insert the SD card or USB drive into their respective ports and launch CleanRip from the Homebrew Channel. Upon launching it and getting past the disclaimers, you will be asked if you want to enable checksum calculations. This basically means the system will perform integrity checks on the data after the rip is complete to make sure it's correct, and I personally think that's a good idea so select Yes.
You will then be asked to specify whether you're going to be sending your dumps to an SD card or USB drive and what file system it's formatted with. Since you wrote down what your destination drive's file system is, you don't need to do any guesswork as you can just select the one you wrote down. In my case, I went with my SD card which was formatted as FAT32, as shown below. You'll be told to insert whatever it is and if it's already connected, you can just press A to continue. You will then be prompted to check for updated redump.org DAT files, but since you already have the latest database you can select "No".
You will then be asked to put a game into the disk slot (if not done already) and to press A to begin. It will begin preparations to start dumping the game, but it's still got some questions for you. If you are dumping a Wii game, an additional menu will pop up asking you if the game is on a double-layered disk (by default, it's set to "auto" which means it will detect it for you), how much data it should fit into a single file before splitting it up into another chunk, and whether to use a new device per chunk. I have shown my settings below which creates only two chunks (or none if the destination is not using FAT32) and uses the same disk for both chunks. Once the settings are set to your liking, press A to continue. You will be asked if the disk is an unauthorized disk made by Datel (the company behind the Action Replay amongst other early unauthorized software), but select No. It'll ask you if you want it to remember your settings for next time, and whether to do this is entirely up to you. It will then begin reading and dumping the disk.
Once complete, you should now have the chunks on the root directory of whatever you chose to throw the dumps onto. If you want you can repeat the cycle with other games as well. If your destination card/drive was formatted to the FAT32 file system or you chose to use multiple chunks, there will be multiple ISO files with
.partX.iso appended at the end. If you want or need to combine them, copy them to a folder on your computer and open a command prompt or terminal window. The command to combine the files differs between the two operating systems.Note #3: The first part of the file name (with the one noted below being RQOE69) is the internal ID for the game you dumped. Only combine files with the same internal ID.
The files generated by using the settings above to rip Spore Hero. This was done on an SD card formatted as FAT32, so it still got split up into chunks.
If you are running Windows, modify this command to fit your situation and run it:
Code:
copy /b RQOE69.part?.iso RQOE69.isoIf you are running Linux, modify this command to fit your situation and run it. Even if part 2, part 3, and part 4 don't exist, it'll still work just fine.
Bash:
cat RQOE69.part*.iso > RQOE69.isoNow you're done. You can load these ISOs into the Dolphin Emulator or do basically whatever you want with it. In order to load this backup onto the system, you either need to burn it to a DVD and install a modchip into your system's DVD drive or stick it on a USB hard drive (or something similar) and load it in with USB Loader GX, which requires the installation of custom IOSes to use.
Dumping software from the NAND
The Wii had a notoriously small internal storage and could only fit basic games like Bejeweled 2 and Ace Attorney. With that said, it's still highly advised to liberate anything installed onto your console anyways because traditional WAD downloaders don't have everything. To begin, copy the homebrew application Yet Another BlueDump MOD to your SD card or USB drive and launch it. You will be greeted by a menu telling you what your currently set IOS is and whether hardware protection is enabled. Simply press A to continue. It will proceed to mount the SD card and USB drive if present.
You'll then be sent to a menu giving you a choice between various types of channels. Each type has their own purpose and reason to exist. "System Titles" are used for internal stuff like IOS versions and System Menu versions, "Disc Savedata" is mostly just savedata in games loaded from physical media, "Installed Channel Titles" are WiiWare and homebrew applications, "System Channel Titles" are just pre-instaleld channels like the News Channel and the Forecast Channel, "Games that use Channels (Channel+Save)" are channels provided by games like Wii Fit and Mario Kart Wii, and "Hidden Channels" are more internal channels that really shouldn't be fucked with. Choose the type of channels you want to dump by navigating to the option and pressing A. You will be presented with a scrollable list of channels it found matching that type. Pick the channel that you want to dump by navigating to it and pressing the 1 button on your Wii Remote (or Y button if using a GameCube controller). A menu should appear asking you to select what to do. Use the D-Pad to navigate to the option to backup the channel to a WAD and press A.
You will be given a series of questions about whether you want to fakesign the "ticket" and "TMD" and if you want to change the region of the resulting WAD file. The guides I've read have had conflicting answers to these questions. Dolphin's wiki says to say no to all of them, while the Wii hacking guide says to say yes to fakesign the ticket, but no for everything else. Feel free to choose which one to follow but I'd personally recommend just saying no to everything like Dolphin said. It will then begin to package it up into a WAD file. If it fails to access the very first content file, then chances are the game is either somehow missing important files or is located on an SD card. Once it completes, you will be given the file path to the WAD file and asked to press any button to go back to the channel list. If you want, you can repeat the process for other channels to dump them as well or dump your save data for that by doing the the same thing above but instead going with the options to dump the save data instead.
Congratulations, you've liberated your Wii save data and installed channels. You can install them in the Dolphin Emulator or other consoles.
eBooks
The eBook industry is frustrating. If you have books on Nook and Kindle, you can't just have one device from them that can read everything from either platform. No interoperability, meaning you're locked into their walled gardens. While you can usually transfer over books that use standardized formats, the means of getting books in such a format are where things get tricky. Thankfully, there are ways to liberate your eBooks and finally put them to good use. This is a certainly more involved process than most other types of media formats, but publishing companies have historically hated when people are in control of what they are allowed to use to read.For this, we are going to need to install an application called Calibre, which you can get here. It is a free and open source eBook manager program, though that's not what we're going to install this for. This program alone cannot liberate eBooks, but we can install a plugin that does. Once Calibre is installed, we will need to install additional plugins called DeDRM and Obok, which you can get here. Once you download the latest release's ZIP file, extract the ZIP files that are inside it to your Downloads folder. Open Calibre and click Preferences, then click "Plugins" in the window that pops up. Click "Load plugin from file" and select the ZIP files you just extracted.
Now, this still isn't enough to begin liberating eBooks, we have just established the foundation. The process is different between services as they usually use different means of keeping control to themselves, so I've split the known ways up into sections of their own.
Adobe Digital Editions (ACSM)
Adobe Digital Editions (abbreviated as ADE) is Adobe's own proprietary format. Some colleges use it for their class materials, and it features its own set of inconveniences. We can do better than that.ACSM files are not the book themselves, they're set of instructions for ADE to download the actual eBook, so we'll need to have it installed on your computer. Install the ADE desktop application onto your computer and log in with your Adobe account, then open the ACSM file with ADE. When it shows up in your bookshelf list, that means it finished downloading. On Windows, it will be located at
%USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Digital Editions. Click and drag the EPUB file to Calibre to import it.You've now imported them into Calibre, but you're not done yet. Move onto the Converting the eBooks in Calibre to EPUB files section below and follow the steps from there.
Kindle
Note: From personal experience, the results of liberating Kindle eBooks is inconsistent and appears to be due to changes in how they are secured. Older books seem to work fine, but newer ones (such as Dee's Big Nuts) are either malformed or just don't work.Liberating books from Kindle is one hell of an undertaking and a process that is annoyingly complicated, especially compared to Audible audiobooks. The process depends on the operating systems and the hardware you have on hand. We will need to install an additional plugin called "KFX Input", which you can get here. Follow the steps above but with KFX Input instead, minus the extraction part as that's not necessary here.
If you are using Windows
Note #2: If you are not running Calibre on the same computer as the Amazon Kindle program, you will need to manually import the keys into the application. Follow the guide available here for more information.If you have the Kindle for PC app installed on your computer, verify that it's running a version earlier than 1.26 and if it isn't, uninstall it. Download and run the installer for v1.26 of the desktop application from here. Once installed, do not log into your Amazon account just yet. Go to the menu bar and select Tools, then go to Options. A settings menu will come up in the general page. Unselect "Automatically install updates when they are available without asking me" and click Save.
%USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Kindle Content. The file you will need to look for in these folders will have a .azw file extension. At this point, assuming you installed the KFX input plugin, importing them should be as easy as clicking and dragging the file into Calibre. It will hopefully decrypt the books. You've now imported them into Calibre, but you're not done yet. Move onto the Converting the eBooks in Calibre to epub files section below and follow the steps from there.If you have an Android device
Note #3: This is a considerably more technical solution than just using the guide for Windows as noted above. It also doesn't work on versions of Android newer than Android 10, so if you can't get it to work on your own device, use an old device or an emulator.Note #4: We will be using a very old version of Kindle for Android for this, so some books may not even work properly for this approach.
Android users can install a very old version of Kindle for Android which, when paired with the Android Debug Bridge, will allow you to extract the keys needed to download and liberate your Kindle library. To begin, make sure that Kindle for Android is not already installed on your mobile device and if it is, uninstall it. To begin, enable developer settings (if you haven't already) on your device by following this guide. Once you're done, you should now get an option to go into developer settings. From here, scroll down until you get the option to enable USB debugging. If it's turned off, turn it on.
On your computer, download the Android SDK Platform Tools from the Android developer website here for your respective platform and extract the executables somewhere. Open the command prompt or terminal and navigate to the folder where you just extracted everything. Plug your phone into your computer via USB. To verify that things are working, run the command below (adding a
./ if you are running Mac or Linux) to list the devices you have connected.
Bash:
adb devices -lIf no devices were found or it is asking about pending authorization, wake your device up and unlock it. A prompt should come up asking if you want to enable USB debugging. Select "Yes" or "Allow". At this point, try running the command again. This time, the command should return something. If you are running BlueStacks, you must explicitly enable USB debugging in its advanced settings and then connect to it with something like
adb connect localhost:5555, replacing the 5555 with the port in the settings if necessary.Download Kindle for Android v4.16.0.75 from OldVersion.com here and stick it into the same folder where you are running ADB from. Back at the command line, run this command to install it onto your device:
Bash:
adb install com.amazon.kindle-4.16.0.75-1145045067-minAPI16.apkIf it fails with the error
INSTALL_FAILED_DEPRECATED_SDK_VERSION, then as noted above you can't use this device for what we're going to do. If it succeeds, then we can proceed. After it finishes installing, run the app and log in with your Amazon account. If it asks you to grant permissions, disable the permissions for contacts and phone data. Once you're logged in, on your computer run the command below to make a backup of Kindle for Android's entire dataset. A pop-up may show up on the device prompting you for confirmation about the backup, simply select "Back up my data".
Bash:
adb backup com.amazon.kindlebackup.ad) will be located in the directory you ran the command from. If you get a small file (like 0-1 KB in size), the backup failed. If this is the case, run adb backup --all instead. You have now dumped the key needed to continue onward. On Calibre, go back to the plugins options menu and search for DeDRM. Select the plugin with the same name and click "Customize plugin". A window will pop up with a bunch of options regarding eBooks. Click on "Kindle for Android ebooks".Another window will come up showing a blank list of keys. Click the green + symbol to open a window, which will prompt you to choose the backup file you dumped earlier. Once you've chosen the backup file, give the key a unique name, then click OK. At this point you can close the settings windows and begin to liberate your books. On your device, go back to the Kindle app and download the desired books by simply tapping their cover. Books will be indicated as downloaded by a checkmark overlay at the bottom right corner of the cover. They will be located on the device's internal storage at
/Android/data/com.amazon.kindle/files/ in their own separate directories. The files we are looking for this time around will have a .prc file extension.At this point, importing them should be as easy as clicking and dragging the files into Calibre. It will hopefully decrypt the books. You've now imported them into Calibre, but you're not done yet. Move onto the Converting the eBooks in Calibre to epub files section below and follow the steps from there.
Converting the eBooks in Calibre to liberated EPUB files
In Calibre, select the books you want to convert and click "Convert books". A window looking like the one of the two below will come up to let you tweak the conversion process. I found the default settings to be just fine, so unless you want to do any tweaks yourself, just click "OK".
Calibre will the begin to convert the book to the more traditional EPUB-formatted file, which may take some time depending on the book. If you want to see how far along it is, click the text at the bottom right corner of the program mentioning "Jobs". A window will come up telling you what it's doing, the status, how far along it is in doing that, how long it's been doing it, and when you told it to do it. Once complete, the converted files will be in wherever Calibre is configured to put the books, which is by default set to
%USERPROFILE%/Calibre Library on Windows in folders for each author and then book. The liberated file will have a .epub file extension, and will be listed as "EPUB Document" if viewed by details.Congratulations, your eBooks have been liberated.
Audible Audiobooks
Audible is the largest producer and seller of audiobooks in the United States, but being owned by a big corporation with a motivation for profit, you're only going to get DRM-riddled copies of what you pay for by default. However, free and open source software exists which allow you to liberate your collection and get the raw audio data within.To begin, download the free and open source application known as Libation from its official GitHub page and run it. You will be asked whether or not you're a new user or one returning from an upgrade. Obviously, you pick the "New User" option. It will then ask you if you want to take a tour of the application, click Yes as this will basically show you how to use the application and import your audiobooks. As you follow the quick start guide, you will be asked to log into your Amazon account. If you use Two Factor Authentication, use the more advanced approach where you click a URL and log in through the Amazon website. Once you've gone through the quick start guide, it should begin to download and liberate your audiobooks but if not, go to Liberate in the menu bar and click "Liberate Visible Books". After it finishes, the now liberated audiobooks will be somewhere in your music folder, for me it was in
~/Music/Libation/Books.
Each book is stored in the M4B format, but if you want the program can be configured to convert them to MP3s by going to Settings -> Settings and going to the Audio File Settings tab, then selecting "Download my books as .MP3 files (transcode if necessary)". Since MP3 is not a lossless format, some information will be lost when during the transcoding process, so keep that in mind. Programs like VLC are capable of natively playing back the M4B files so chances are converting to MP3 isn't always necessary. With that, you're done.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, liberating content isn't just about having and owning the media, it's also about retaining control of the things you pay for. While liberating your library is an involved task with some being more of a hurdle than others, once you overcome said hurdles you can start using your shit the way you want to use it and practically own the content you paid for.You may see subscription services as a better bang for your buck because you get access to a huge selection of shows or games, but in exchange for the cheaper price you are actively paying in another form of currency: control. Some people value convenience and lower costs over that, but eventually the inconveniences of requiring an internet connection, getting screwed over by bad or problematic DRM schemes which hurt you and not the pirates, having to pay more per month every few months to fulfill some rich dickhead's wish for a thirteenth yacht, or even just not being able to access a piece of content that you used to be able to just fine just a few short years ago will come back to bite you in the ass. Why? Because you never truly owned the content you were paying for in the first place, you just owned an account that could be used to access them. Even then, they will still find a way to fuck you over.
I hope this thread serves as a guide for those seeking to go on the same journey I underwent to regain control of the shit you pay for, as a lot of this stems from my own personal anecdotal experiences. If you have anything to contribute to this or even just have any questions, don't be afraid to chime in with a reply of your own.
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