How to Rip a Blu-Ray Disc
The process for ripping a blu-ray movie is only a bit different than ripping a regular DVD. In the same way ripping a DVD takes a bit longer than ripping an audio CD, ripping a Blu-Ray disc takes a bit more time, and also takes up a lot more space on your hard drive. For this reason, we recommend having at least 60GB of extra space on your drive to accomodate the raw movie before you encode it to make it smaller.
What you’ll need:
- Blu-Ray Drive. Some newer computers might come equipped with Blu-Ray readers, but most machines will require additional hardware before they can read Blu-Ray discs. You can pick up an external Blu-Ray drive online for about $50-$60.
- Make MKV. You’ll need this program to break the disc’s copyright protection and perform the initial rip. It’s free, open source, and
- HandBrake. This free and open source video encoder will allow you to tweak just about anything you want after the initial rip – change the file format, make the file smaller, adjust the bitrate, and so much more.
- Between 30 and 60 GB of extra space on your hard drive. HD video takes up a ton of space in its raw and freshly-ripped form, so you need plenty of room to hold it before you encode it and make it more manageable.
Step One: Break Copy Protection
Pop any given movie disc in your drive, and you’ll be able to play it from the disc, but not drag the actual files off the disc to the computer. That’s because of AACS copy protection, which you need to break before you can rip the video.
Install all of the above software, then run MakeMKV. Once the program starts up, click the “Open Disc” button, and it’ll scan the disc (which usually takes a couple minutes) and give you a list of all the chapters in your movie. Bam, consider a copy protection subverted.
Step Two: Rip the Movie
After you’ve successfully broken the copyright protection, MakeMKV will give you a list of chapters on the disc. Scroll around until you find your movie, check the box, and uncheck everything else. Hit the big “Make MKV” button when you’re ready to rip. This should take anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours – it all depends on your computer’s processor. Sit back, relax, and wait for it to finish. It’s best to rip movies when you’re not using your computer for anything else.
Step 3: Transcode the Files
You now have a perfect copy of the Blu-ray on your drive at the original frame size and data rate. But unless you have a couple terabytes just hanging around to play with, you’re going to have to compress it into a smaller, easier-to-handle file. That’s where Handbrake comes in.
Open it up, and select that largest video file in the box that says “video.” A new box will pop up that asks you to select streams. Make sure you choose the 1080p/24 video track, DTS or AC3 audio track, and whatever subtitles you want. Click OK.
The software will fill in some other information on the “Encoding Settings” dialog box. Here, you can play with different settings to decide which type of output file you want. A good starting option is to go with the “Console” option under video profiles. Leave the default setting for the audio profile (usually 2.0 AAC) unless you can take advantage of different settings.
Choose the radio box at the bottom to decide whether you want the final file outputted as an MP4, MKV or AVCHD file, then tell it where to save and click Done.
This step will eat up a lot of time as your computer performs the calculations to cram all that data into a much smaller package. Go pop some popcorn and come back to it. Or take a nap. Depending on how old your PC is and which settings you’ve selected, maybe go on vacation.
When it’s done, be sure to open the output file to confirm that it works. If it does, good work, you’ve just ripped a Blu-ray movie! Keep it off the torrent sites and enjoy your new digital copy.
Did something go awry?
Despite having a few years to work out the kinks, many of the tools used to rip Blu-Ray discs can still be buggy on occasion. If you have any problems, we highly recommend hitting VideoHelp.com, which has more comprehensive guides, different tools to try, explanations of advanced settings, and an extremely skilled user base on its forums that can help dig you out of a hole.
Our How to Rip a DVD or Blu-Ray guide has been updated since its original publication to reflect new software releases, hardware changes and more. Multiple members of the Digital Trends staff contributed to this guide.
I'm not sure why after I installed every thing , and when I try to rep the Anydvd gives me an error "Drive F: is not ready"
where F is my blu-ray burner witch I can watch the movie from it directly, so the driver is working fine
Also after all I wish to know how to use the ripped file to burn dvd or even blu-ray rwiteable better
so, I have read up on this anyDVD HD, but the only question that I have I can't seem to find an answer to: does it remove the copyright protection on the actual disc and physically alter it?
no. not possible – the disks are read-only.
I use DVDfab to rip my dvd, but for the audio part, it does not keep the dts, it is alwasy in prologic
That used to be an option well, i remember a “Delete DTS’ options, but i just went through the setup menu on my copy of the latest version, and i don’t see it.
I've been using only HandBrake on the MacPro & it works in just one step.
There are a few cases where the files won't read to be ripped.
I think when I upgraded the ware, is when it became a problem.
Glad I found you guys on YouTube to help out in this process. Thanks'
I didn't see a link here for DVD43, but did search avs and the reviews weren't that good,
for a MacPro anyway.
Quote from there for alternative:
with mac the ripper then I make a queue in hand brake to compress them overnight.
I think this might help with those stubborn movies.
nice for sharing ,so kind of you
oh, cool staff. Thanks for sharing.
I use UFUSoft Blu-ray Ripper rip my commercial Blu-ray/DVD discs and convert to kinds of formats, and only $49 dollars.
DVDfab handles any transcoding you might want to do. (Though that increases the price over the basic ripper/de-CSS/de-Region Code version.
Also, i’ve been using DVDFab since long before i had a dual-core CPU; no problems.
More important than the CPU is disk space. A straight rip of a DVD with no transcoding will take three to nine gig of disk space.
Hi I found your tutorial really helpful. and I have been using DVD43 and Handbrake to rip my DVD's. it has been successful for quite a number of DVDs but recently I have started to get a problem. basically, on completion of the ripping and on playback I found that the chapters of the movie have been shuffled so that after the first 5 minutes, it straight away jumps to near the end of the movie, after which it will jump to some other part of the movie, so on and so forth!
Is there some problem in Handbrake? What am i doing wrong? it will be great if you could help me out!
I suspect that it’s something in the new DVDs.
Have you checked for any updates to the program?
Try ripping one of the same ones you were already successful. If it works okay, then the problem is probably not the software – well, aside from not having been updated to handle newer protections.
If it messes up on the one you previously succeeded on, the program is corrupted; uninstall, and re-install.
And, if it still doesn’t work, do what i do:
Use DVDFab
I use Pavtube Blu-ray Ripper do this, just one tool!
As far as I know, some people use AnyDVD to remove protections of their Blu-ray discs firstly, and then use an MTS/M2TS Converter to convert the .m2ts BD files into their wanted media formats. This is a definitely complicated matter, and why don’t they choose a one-stop Blu-ray ripper to do it once and for all? I guess that they may have not found a proper application to do this at all. Well, to assist you guys to simplify the conversion procedures, it’s my pleasure here to share a pretty good Blu-ray ripper to you all, hope it will be of great help for you who are searching for this solution just right.I use this one, you can check it out,http://bit.ly/1i0Wop
Hi Neo, I also like Pavtube but it is slow to complete the whole process. I have tried Anydvd trial and it ripped a 2 hr movie in about 1 hr and bluray ripper takes 3 to 4 hrs.
Am I doing something wrong in Pavtube? Also do u know why Pavtube recommends or suggest using bluray ripper and byte copy together isnt this the equavalent as using Any DvD with handbrake?
Looking foward to ur reply.
Thanks