10 Years of Movie Archiving! - wolfy
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10 Years of Movie Archiving!<br>Automatic Ripping Machine is turning 10!
wolfy<br>Jun 22, 2026
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We’ve come a long way since Benjamin Brian’s first commit 24 July 2016.<br>What was once a humble set of shell scripts has turned into the largest archival tool in it’s class.<br>On 14 July 2018, v2.0.0 was released, the first major rewrite into python.<br>After a number of years early on, the project had effectively died and the original devs were not pushing fixes. That’s when I found ARM and started tinkering with it. I went looking for forks that were still active and found 1337-server’s.<br>I kept pestering him with PRs until he eventually made me a maintainer on his fork and together we started pestering upstream with our PR’s from his fork. Within a year or so, upstream (and the entire GitHub organization) was handed over to the two of us and we got to work.<br>On 5 July 2022, v2.6.3 landed, marking first release of the container-first deployment strategy, and ending the matrix of OSes and versions we were struggling to ensure stability across (at one point I had ~8 virtual machines just to test the installer).<br>In early 2023, microtechno9000 rounded out our current core team, helping 1337-server out on the frontend and giving me breathing room to focus on internals and architecture.<br>We’ve spent a few years now with the mature codebase for this project, making small changes here and there, always dreaming of “The v3 Rewrite” and all the underlying problems it would solve. Major recurring issues users faced were:<br>Rip/Transcode Recovery on power loss
Better documentation
Sessions that can be applied on a per-drive basis
Better resource utilization (the ripping process in the mono-container would choke the UI, etc)
Database issues with multiple concurrent rips
And now it’s (almost) here!<br>Fully rewritten from a monolithic container to a multi-container app with one container per domain: ui, db, backend, ripper, transcoder (ephemeral)
Full-fat db to eliminate the locking issues we had when using SQLite
Support for Sessions
Full hardware transcoding support
True trunk-based development model
Endless DX improvments
New documentation
The v3 release candidates are live on my personal fork to keep this very hot code from breaking anything for our existing users. Once we’ve got a stable build that passes all of our acceptance testing, I’ll PR the changes all at once so we can have a nice, clean changeover.
Come Celebrate!
Join us on 26 June 2026 at 1800-0000CST to celebrate 10 years of ARM with a watch party of Sintel and Big Buck Bunny, two of a series of open-source movies produced by the Blender Foundation, as well as a demo of v3 (hopefully with no technical issues!)<br>I couldn’t have done this without 1337-server, microtechno9000, and, of course, y’all the users. I actually haven’t ever used ARM to archive any of my own movies, I’ve always wanted to fix something else first XD
ARM Discord Link: https://discord.gg/EJVfNRyDAQ<br>Event Link: https://discord.com/events/977616973942906880/1518672281285558493
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