How to Rip a DVD or Blu-ray Movie

Learn how to burn and rip both DVD and Blu-Ray movies.

Are you ready to turn outlaw?

Hollywood wants you to buy its movies on DVD and Blu-ray disc, but then it wants to control what you do with them once you get home. We’re going to show you how to do something that Hollywood most definitely does not want you to do: Copy those movies to your hard drive or media server so that you can enjoy them without ever having to get off your couch to drop a disc in your DVD or Blu-ray player.

Once you have the movie on your hard drive, you can do all kinds of other neat stuff with it, such as transcode it to another format so you can watch it on a handheld digital media player—or delete those annoying messages from the FBI and Interpol messages warning you of the penalties for doing what we’re about to show you how to do.

While we fully acknowledge that the movie industry has the right to protect its intellectual property, we also believe that consumers have the right to enjoy the property they purchase. The concept is called fair use: If you bought a movie on DVD, you should have the right to make a back-up copy of it or transfer the content to another medium, such as your computer’s hard drive. You don’t have the right distribute copies of that disc to anyone else, of course, and you don’t have the right to copy discs you don’t own, e.g, movies you borrow from a friend or rent from Netflix. But you knew that already.

• Standard DVDs

• Blu-ray Discs