Ripping a BluRay Disc?

[ChrisA]

Someone gave me a blu ray disc they recorded themselves. It is not copy protected and is formatted to play on a normal home BR player. I need to get the video files off the disc in into my iMac so I can edit.

My iMac does not have a blu ray reader. So I ask two questions:

1) What software is best to rip the disc, or do I even need software other then finder to copy the files.

2) What's the best blue ray device to buy that works well with Mac OS X. My iMac has both FW800 and USB2. Now I just need to read the disc but in the future maybe I might want to write a disc

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

1. MakeMKV.
2. I just bought the cheapest I could find on Amazon. Worked like a charm, and is stil going after 4 years.

 

[kohlson]

USB 2 will be slow. You're talking about squirting several GBs through a very slow port. If there's not much price difference, make sure to get a USB3 interface. That way when you get a newer system it will take advantage of it.

 

[flashy-cat]

1 MakeMKV

2 I bought this one

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Sl...ie=UTF8&qid=1462104158&sr=8-2&keywords=se-506

Only USB 2 but my iMac 2011 doesn't have USB 3 anyway.

 

[DrBubba]

1 MakeMKV

2 I bought this one

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-Sl...ie=UTF8&qid=1462104158&sr=8-2&keywords=se-506

Only USB 2 but my iMac 2011 doesn't have USB 3 anyway.

[doublepost=1462124731][/doublepost]Ditto to this setup. I'm using the exact same thing and it works beautifully for ripping Blu-Ray discs. No worries about the flavor of USB, it just takes a tad longer on 2 vice 3. MakeMKV is a self-labeled "beta" release requiring a key to work. The current key is good thru May 2016 and after than you just visit their website an grab a new key. I done this many times without incident or problem.

 

[ChrisA]

[doublepost=1462124731][/doublepost]Ditto to this setup. I'm using the exact same thing and it works beautifully for ripping Blu-Ray discs....

Thanks, that BR drive you both use is also the #1 selling BR drive on Amazon. I'll order it along with some other I need. I didn't know about MakeMKV as I don't rip many discs as most of the video I work with comes from a camera.

This BR disc was filled with data from a scan of 16mm film. It is 1080/16P. Yes HD and 16fps as was the common frame rate at the time this was shot.

 

[Nermal]

You don't need MakeMKV; you can open the "raw" .m2ts files with VLC if you prefer.

 

[MacBH928]

I thought macs do not have the ability to play BD discs?!

 

[Nermal]

They do if you add the required hardware (a drive) and software (MakeMKV, VLC, Macgo, etc).

 

[Maxwill]

Well, MakeMKV allows you to output a big MKV file with no quality loss, you can then play the files on Mac with VLC. If you wish for more output options, perhaps you'd better look for makemkv alternative like DVDFab, Pavtube ByteCopy, etc.

 

[HDFan]

I have two USB3 Buffalo Media Stations that can write up to 16X:

http://www.buffalotech.com/products/optical-drives

I believe the Samsung can write to 6X.

They are more expensive, but I have burned hundreds of DVD's (no blu-rays tho due to blank expense) and have had absolutely no problems with them. The Amazon reviews seem to be about 10% better for the Buffalo than the Samsung. The USB 2 version is about the same price on the Dell website as the Samsung. HP has the Buffalo on their website but not the Samsung.

As for USB 2 vs USB 3 you can use either. USB 2 has a theoretical 60 MB/sec rate so you can comfortably do a 16X read/write at ~21 MB/sec given normal conditions. USB 3 goes to 640 MB/sec (theoretical) so it really is overkill for optical media. If there isn't much of a cost difference I'd go with USB 3 though just for obsolescence protection.

 

[\-V-/]

I thought macs do not have the ability to play BD discs?!

MakeMKV can rip lossless copies of a Blu-ray discs to an .mkv container format, which can then be played with VLC or other media players. There are also programs you can buy that play Blu-ray movies directly in OS X, it just requires you to have an external Blu-ray drive.

 

[MacBH928]

Why do they choose MKV instead of mp4 which seems to be supported by everything out there on the opposite of the issues MKV faces?

As for USB 2 vs USB 3 you can use either. USB 2 has a theoretical 60 MB/sec rate so you can comfortably do a 16X read/write at ~21 MB/sec given normal conditions. USB 3 goes to 640 MB/sec (theoretical) so it really is overkill for optical media. If there isn't much of a cost difference I'd go with USB 3 though just for obsolescence protection.

View attachment 638928

I thought the faster speeds always puts out coffee coasters and the slower speeds are always better

 

[Nermal]

Well, MakeMKV allows you to output a big MKV file with no quality loss, you can then play the files on Mac with VLC.

But VLC can already play .m2ts files. Why add another step for no obvious gain?

 

[Mac 128]

But VLC can already play .m2ts files. Why add another step for no obvious gain?

Dos the region code matter when doing this? There's some BluRays released in Europe only, and not yet in the US, that I'd like to archive. When using a setup like this, do I have to set the hardware to a specific region, or will VLC do that?

 

[Nermal]

Dos the region code matter when doing this? There's some BluRays released in Europe only, and not yet in the US, that I'd like to archive. When using a setup like this, do I have to set the hardware to a specific region, or will VLC do that?

That's a change from the original question, which was around playing a home-made Blu-ray (no region code or copy protection). I have no experience with using VLC for commercial Blu-rays.

 

[Mac 128]

That's a change from the original question, which was around playing a home-made Blu-ray (no region code or copy protection). I have no experience with using VLC for commercial Blu-rays.

Oops, thanks ... it would seem I misread.

 

[Mac 128]

Well, MakeMKV allows you to output a big MKV file with no quality loss, you can then play the files on Mac with VLC. If you wish for more output options, perhaps you'd better look for makemkv alternative like DVDFab, Pavtube ByteCopy, etc.

I'm converting MKV files to a smaller format I can play on my Apple TV 4K, and other iOS Devices. Now that MacOS, iOS and tvOS support HEVC H.265 transcoding, I'm not sure which I should be using or what the advantages are of it over H.264 vs. the drawbacks.

One big drawback seems to be the time to encode into a HQ .265 file over a .264. I tried using Handbrake to convert the MKV file to a .265 file and it indicated it was going to take 56 hours to convert a 1-hour 1080p video. I ended up doing a .264 conversion at average settings in under 2 hours.

So the question is really, what settings should I use to get optimum performance and picture quality in the conversion to an .m4v file? Is it really worth the time to convert to the highest quality file possible?