Diligent consumers don’t do that. They pay their bill off faster than fees can be incurred. It’s the other consumers, the undisciplined and the poor, who get sucked dry by fees. These are not the demographic of international travelers. One demographic is subsidizing another.

The interesting thing is that if you’re in the diligent demographic, you can make the shitty bank lose money. Profit from those they exploit is the same whether you create a loss for the bank or not.

I would not even announce centralized instances like piefed.ca. It’s part of the Cloudflare giant.

I have not tried much of anything yet. I just got a cheap laptop with a BD which came with Windows and VLC. I popped in a blu-ray disc from the library and it could not handle it… something about not having a aacs decoder or something like that. I didn’t spend any time on it yet but ultimately in principle I would install debian and try to liberate the drive to read BDs.

thanks!

Though I should mention my original motivation with makemkv was to rip blu-ray discs, which has complications that go beyond DVD. But the DVD guide will still be quite useful.

Wow, thanks for the research and effort! I will be taking your approach for sure.