Common wisedom says to not give up. But nevertheless sometimes, that seems to be exactly the right thing to do.
Project FJITA (no, I will not explain what the acronym means) was an interesting idea that originated in 2007. Back then, I became interested in the lower-level details of DVDs. I had build a hardware hack that allowed me to capture the raw bitstream from DVDs, and wrote a software decoder for DVD bitstreams.