Ripping a Blu-ray disc provides a much larger file than a DVD, well over 4GB. While a Blu-ray MKV. Download: MakeMKV for Windows, Mac, and Linux ($60). Free Mac Blu-ray Player. Free Mac Blu-ray Player, the professional and Free Blu-ray Player and DVD Player software for Mac, is especially designed for Mac users to have a visual feast with their family and friends.
Blu-Ray may be majestic, but it also has more copy protection than any other format around, and playing it on your computer can be difficult to impossible. Here’s how to rip those movies for glorious HD movies, anywhere you want them.
Apart from its very heavy copy protection, you can only play Blu-Ray discs in a few choice desktop computer programs, most of which cost a lot of money. If you use a Mac, it becomes even more difficult, and it’s pretty much impossible on Linux. Luckily, video encoding has come a long way since the days of grainy, 700MB DVD rips, and you can get high quality Blu-Ray rips that can weigh in anywhere between 4 and 12 GB each, depending on how close to the original source you want them to be. Best of all is that even a 4GB file looks a ton better than those DVD rips, so by ripping your Blu-Rays, you can still get that amazing HD quality on any computer you want—no Blu-Ray drive or expensive software required (you’ll need a Blu-Ray drive to rip them though, of course—but then you’ll be able to play those files anywhere).
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There are a lot of different methods for ripping and encoding Blu-Rays, several different encoding programs, and more than a few ripping solutions. We combed through the options to pull together the simplest, working method using the best free programs we could find. In addition, everyone’s preferences on quality and method of encoding are different, so you may prefer some advanced options we do not cover here, but this is intended to be a fairly simple, hassle-free guide for people who want to get the job done. It makes a compromise between being easy to execute without sacrificing too much quality. Also, this method is 100% cross-platform, as both programs are available on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
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What You’ll Need
Unlike a lot of the Blu-Ray guides I’ve stumbled onto, you’ll only need a few things for ours:
A Blu-Ray Drive. This is pretty obvious; you won’t get far if your computer can’t read Blu-Ray discs. You can get them for as low as $60 now on Newegg if you don’t already have one.
Previously mentionedMakeMKV for the initial Blu-Ray rip. It’s about the sipmlest ripper on the market, rips your movie to a high quality MKV file for easy encoding, and is free while in beta (which, so far, has been a very long time). If you have another ripper that just rips the disc in its original format, like AnyDVD HD, that should work just as well, but if you don’t have a program on hand, MakeMKV will do the job brilliantly.
Handbrake, our favorite (and your favorite) cross platform, open source video encoder. There are a few other programs out there that will encode HD video, and some of them are a bit easier to navigate, most notably Ripbot264. However, I and many others have had problems running this on 64-bit versions of Windows 7, so I decided to go with Handbrake instead. Make sure you’re using the latest version.
Anywhere from 30 to 60 GB of hard disk space, depending on what you’re ripping. Blu-Rays are big, and we’re going to rip the whole thing to our drive first, so depending on the movie you’re ripping and the quality you want in your final movie file, you’ll need a good amount of space. An external hard drive will work just fine if you have one and don’t have the space on your PC.
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That’s it. Unlike using RipBot or other similar methods, you won’t need AviSynth, ffdshow, or any of the other many installations such programs often require. Just download and install MakeMKV and Handbrake (if you don’t have them already) and you’ll be good to go.
Step One: Rip the Movie with MakeMKV
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The first thing we’re going to do is rip our movie to our hard drive, which will produce a very large MKV file of your movie at full, 1080p, Blu-Ray quality. It’ll be very large, but we’ll slim it down later, so for right now, don’t worry about how big it is.
Open up MakeMKV and hit the bit “Open Disc” button. It will scan through your disc, which will take a few minutes. When it’s done, it’ll give you a list of the chapters on the disc. Find your movie (usually the longest title) and uncheck all the other boxes. Then, just choose your Output Folder and hit the “Make MKV” button. Usually this’ll take a half hour or so, depending on the size of your disc, but once it’s done you should have a big MKV file waiting for you in the folder you chose.
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Step Two: Choose Your Resolution in Handbrake
Now comes the more complicated (but also more fun) part of the process. There are a lot of settings available in Handbrake, and while we won’t delve into all the advanced features it has, you still have some choices to make and some settings to tweak. Most of it is personal preference, but we’ll outline what we recommend for getting the best compromise between quality and space savings on a movie-by-movie basis, so you can fit as many of those HD movies on your hard drive as possible.
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The first thing you want to think about (which will affect your output size pretty heavily) is resolution. Blu-Rays are 1080p natively, and by default, Handbrake will keep that resolution. However, you may want to consider toning it down to 720p for some movies. 720p is still HD, but takes up quite a bit less space—in fact, by bringing our test movies down to 720p, I nearly halved the size of the final file. And, if we’re being honest, certain movies just don’t need all those pixels—I love Anchorman as much as anybody, but I don’t need to see Will Ferrel running around cracking jokes in magnificent 1080p. The Dark Knight, on the other hand, probably deserves all the pixels 1080p can offer. It’s up to you to decide which movies you’d like to dedicate an extra few gigs to, but toning the less visually interesting ones down is something I’d highly recommend.
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If you’re ripping a movie that deserves 1080p, you can skip this step, because 1080p is the already the default resolution. If you want to change it to 720p, then click on the Picture tab (or the “Picture Settings” button along the top of the HandBrake window, depending on your platform). Set the “Anamorphic” box to “loose” and change the width to 1280. Note that Handbrake crops out the black bars on either side to save some space, so your height will not be 720, but rest assured that it will be what you know as 720p quality. Exit that window and return to HandBrake’s main settings.
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Step Three: Set Your Quality Settings and Encode
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Next, hit the High Profile preset in the right sidebar and choose your output type. I like MKV; it’s open in nature, supports DTS and AC3 audio, and works great in quite a few media players, including most media center software. Choose H.264 as your video codec and head to the Audio tab. Here, you have a few options depending on the nature of your disc. It will likely be some form of either AC3 (aka Dolby Digital) or DTS—there are a few different versions of each, but for each I recommend choosing the Passthru option for your Audio codec (AC3 Passthru or DTS Passthru). If you choose the DTS-HD or TrueHD track, you’ll get lossless audio, but you can save some space by choosing the regular DTS or AC3 track with very little loss in quality.
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Lastly, we’ll pick the quality of our encode. This part is pretty open to experimentation, but it’s pretty widely accepted that doing a constant quality encode is the best option, so select that. I and many others have found that an RF of 18 is the “sweet spot” for Blu-Rays. This setting will give you a file much smaller than your original MKV (around 15% the size, I’ve found), but with quality nearly indiscernible to your eyes from the original. If you have particularly sensitive eyes, you may want it closer to 16, or even 14 for some Blu-Rays. If you tend to not notice minor imperfections, maybe and RF of 20 is more your speed. Again, this is personal preference, and it can depend on the movie too—movies with lots of fast motion and dark scenes will need a higher quality setting—that is, a lower RF—to look good. So, you may have to play with it a bit before you make your final decision. I’ve found a good way to do this is to rip a single scene using MakeMKV, then test that with a few different quality settings in Handbrake before encoding the final movie, since encoding the whole movie can take a long time.
When you’re ready, hit the encode button and let it go to town. It will take a little while, depending on the settings you’ve chosen, so maybe now is a time to kick back with a cold one and, if you’ve already ripped one of your Blu-Rays, watch one (or two or five—seriously, it could take awhile). Once you’ve ripped your movies, you can watch them either in our favorite video players for Windows, Mac, and Linux, or put together a turbo charged XBMC computer for your home theater.
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Like I said before, this is certainly not the only way to rip your Blu-Ray discs. A lot of people prefer different programs and settings, but if you’re not a true audio or videophile, these settings should help you upgrade your movie collection to HD without taking terabytes of space. As always, if you have your own favorite methods for ripping HD content, sound off in the comments.
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To this day, there are very few ways to watch your Blu-Ray collection on your computer without shelling out cash for the privilege, even if you already own a Blu-Ray drive and bought your movies. Instead, it’s simpler to rip your Blu-Rays to your computer and play them in whatever app you want. Here’s the best way to do it, and how to keep your file sizes small enough to store your entire collection.
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This way, you don’t need to swap discs, you can play your movies in any app you want, and you can even stream them to your other devices. You can even add your old DVD collection. If you want to rip your DVDs, this process will work as well, but we’ll focus on Blu-Rays—our recommended process for DVDs is a little different.
What You’ll Need
You’ll need a few tools in order to start ripping your Blu-Ray collection. Before you begin, make sure you have installed the following:
A Blu-Ray drive. If your computer came with any disc drive at all, it was probably a DVD drive. However, you’ll need a Blu-Ray reader in order to rip your Blu-Ray discs (obviously). Fortunately, you can get them online for less than $60. If you want to burn your own Blu-Ray discs, you’ll need a drive that can read and write to blank Blu-Rays, but we’ll assume you just want to store them on your hard drive.
MakeMKV: This application, available for both Windows and macOS, rips your Blu-Rays to an MKV file. That’s it. MakeMKV offers a free beta that works for 30 days, but that’s a little misleading. Every month, you can either download the latest version of the beta or activate the application using the latest beta key in the forums. This effectively extends the trial period indefinitely. MakeMKV claims that it’s only a beta product, but it’s been in “beta” for years, so it may stay free for a long time. Right now, you shouldn’t have to pay for this program.
Handbrake: MakeMKV will rip your Blu-Ray movie exactly as it is on the disc, which can be over 20 or 30GB in size. So, we’ll use Handbrake to compress your MKV files to something a little more manageable, without losing much quality. It’s not strictly necessary, but it’s a waste of resources to store, play, and stream huge video files if you don’t need to.
This is all you need. Once you have all three of these things installed, grab your favorite Blu-Ray movies and get started.
Step One: Rip Your Blu-Ray With MakeMKV
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First, you’ll need to do a basic rip of your Blu-Ray. MakeMKV is a dead simple app that does one thing really well: make a full-size, 1080p MKV video file from your Blu-Ray disc. Once you have your MKV, you can shrink it, convert it, or modify it however you want. You can even watch it as-is, if you prefer, but it’s probably better if you shrink it down a bit later.
To rip your movie, put the disc in your Blu-Ray drive and open MakeMKV. After a moment, a big Blu-Ray drive icon will appear. Click this to scan the titles on your disc.
Once MakeMKV is done scanning for titles, you’ll see a list of them in the left-hand panel of the app. You can choose which titles you want to rip here. This list will include special features, deleted scenes, and anything else on the disc. It may take a little guess work to figure out which tracks are which, but if you just want the movie, it’s probably the really big track that takes up around 20-30GB on the disc. Select just the tracks you want to rip.
Next, on the right side of the window, choose the folder where you’d like to place the MKV file. This should be on a hard drive that has plenty of free space. You can see an estimate of how big the file should be in the Info section, but assume that you’ll need an extra 20+ GB or so just in case (which you’ll need later for converting your file anyway). When you’re ready, click the Make MKV button with the green arrow.
MakeMKV will take a while to rip your movie (usually about 20 to 30 minutes). A green progress bar will let you know how far along the process is. If at any point you need to cancel the rip, click the orange stop icon.
Once the rip is done, you’ll see a pop up like this one. You can now take the disc out of your disc drive, and even start a new rip if you want.
At this point, if you want to watch your movie, you can load it up in VLC, Plex, Kodi, or any other video player that supports MKVs and start watching. If you don’t care about saving space on your hard drive, you can stop here. However, we’re going to tweak things to make your library a little cleaner and more efficient.
Step Two: Shrink Your Movies to a Reasonable Size With Handbrake
If you open the folder with your newly ripped movie in it, you’ll notice that it’s probably huge.
To fix this, launch Handbrake and choose File to open a single video. You can also choose Folder (Batch Scan) to scan several video files at once, if you have multiple rips you want to convert. This step will only scan details about the files before you convert them, so you can choose a folder containing all of your rips at once, then decide how to convert them later.
Once Handbrake is done scanning your files, you’ll see a window like the one below. If you batch scanned several movies at once, you can choose which one you want to convert by clicking the Title drop down in the Source section.
Once you’ve chosen your title, click Browse under the Destination section to choose where you want to put your converted files.
Next comes the tougher part: choosing your quality settings.
The easiest way to do this is to pick a preset from the right side of the app window. Which one you choose will depend on how much of the original video you want to preserve. For example, you may want to see every glorious detail of the robot fights in Pacific Rim because that movie was designed with high resolution special effects in mind. On the other hand, you probably won’t miss much if you compress your copy of What We Do In the Shadows, because it’s a comparatively low-budget indie comedy movie that doesn’t have a ton of effects. Besides, jokes are funny regardless of resolution.
With that in mind, you have a few options for shrinking your movies:
Use a high quality, high resolution preset: All Blu-Rays ship in 1080p, but the rip you made with MakeMKV is still uncompressed from the version on the disc. Choose a preset like Super HQ 1080p30 Surround to keep as much detail as possible while still shrinking the file size. This is the best option to go with for visually intense or special effects heavy movies. (Note, however, that if you want higher quality audio, you may want to go to the “Audio” tab and change the “AAC” dropdown to “DTS Passthru” or “AC3 Passthru”, depending on whether the original audio is DTS or AC3).
Use a high quality, lower resolution preset: Technically high-definition video includes both 1080p and 720p. Stepping down to 720p might sound like it’s a huge drop in quality, but in most cases, it’s not. In fact, a high quality 720p file with with minimal compression will usually look better than a lower quality 1080p rip with a lot of compression. If you want to reduce your file size further without sacrificing too much video quality, use a preset like Super HQ 720p30 Surround or HQ 720p30 Surround. This is ideal for movies where the visuals aren’t that important, or ones that won’t look that good compared to modern movies anyway. Comedies, low-budget action movies, or just movies you don’t care about very much can fit into this category.
Use a low quality, lower resolution preset: The last two presets should cover you for most things, but if you need to prioritize saving space and just don’t care about picture quality for some movies, you can drop down to a lower quality and lower resolution preset like Very Fast 720p30 to save a ton of space. This is perfect for those movies in your “bad movie” collection like Sharknado, Birdemic, or the new Fantastic Four.
It’s up to you to decide whether you care more about high quality video or saving space on your hard drive. Fortunately, you can make that decision on a case by case basis.
For most people, the basic presets should do the trick. But if you know what you’re doing, feel free to tweak any other advanced settings in the Video, Audio, and Subtitles tabs—if the video quality isn’t high enough for you, for example, you may want an RF of 16 instead of 18 under the “Video” tab. You may also want to change the Framerate from 30 to “Same as Source”.
Lastly, under “Container”, you can choose MP4 or MKV. MKV offers more features and can contain slightly higher quality video, but MP4 is compatible with more devices, especially mobile devices like the iPhone. Check the device you want to play the file on—if it supports MKV, go with MKV, if not, go with MP4.
When you’re ready to go, click the green Start Encode button to begin converting your video. Alternatively, you can click Add to Queue and move on to the next title that you scanned, then click the green Start Queue button when you’ve finished selecting presets for all of your movies.
Once your files are done converting, they should be anywhere from a little to a lot smaller. Play them to make sure that they’re an acceptable quality level for you, then you can delete the original rips. Now you’re ready to add your movies to your library and start watching.
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