Bluray Ripping Software?

Does anyone have a good Bluray ripper program they can recommend?

I like WinX DVD Ripper Platinum but it doesn’t support Blurays and I can’t find an upgrade or a Bluray capable program on the Digiarty website.

Further googling has led me to even more questions than I started with so I am asking you good people!

Any suggestions?

DVDFab’s stuff or RedFox’s https://redfox.bz/

MakeMKV, which is free during beta. The kicker is it’s never coming out of beta. But it works perfectly and I’ve used it hundreds of times, so I paid for a license to show my appreciation.

You have to use Handbrake to then transcode the rip, but that’s free, too.

I was coming in here to say exactly this. I’ve yet to have a problem with this combo (that wasn’t my own cock up anyway). I also sprang for the license for similar reasons.

Thanks all.

I checked into MakeMKV but it didn’t seem to have support for hard-coding subtitles the way I would like. Maybe I missed it.

This is for my job as a film professor. Typically, I’d screen the films in the classroom but now I have to rip them and upload them to the university’s streaming site so my students can watch at home.

I’d like to hard-code the subtitles because they look better than if I upload the video file and then a separate SRT file. The closed caption effect of white text on a black box is ugly and it offends my aesthetic sensibilities! I’d prefer to have it look like it does when I screen the film in person.

The specific film I’d like to rip today is actually available in 720p on youtube.

Yi Yi

You can see what I mean about the subtitles… my university streaming site looks much the same. Yuck. I’d like to avoid just sending out this youtube link in favor of giving them 1080p with nicer subtitles.

MKV just decrypts and copies the blu-ray to your hard drive/SSD. Handbrake will transcode it, and you can burn-in subtitle tracks in the settings.

Hmm, okay. I never looked into Handbrake. Thanks for the tip.

(But I feel like it would most likely do the same black box effect rather than handsome subtitles.)

SRT files are left up to the player, so subtitle quality there varies widely. You can do ASS instead to get nice looking subtitles.

My guess is that if you’re going to burn them in (agh!) then handbrake can make them look decent.

Maybe I shouldn’t burn them in. I agree with your agh! Especially since I have a number of Chinese students who won’t need them.

I’ll give it some thought… this has been helpful! THX

Handbrake is what I use for DVD and you can do a lot of things with subtitles etc

Thank you for exposing your students to one of the greatest films of all time.

/Checks in disbelief. It wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar?

RIGHT?!

I saw it and loved it when it came out in 2000 and then revisited the film about 15 years later and it was even better than I remembered. Still, I wasn’t sure if a bunch of 18-20 year-olds would like it but I was really delighted by their enthusiastic response. Since then, I’ve screened it every semester and it always goes over really well. Yang-Yang is their favorite.

I think you get more out of it (or recognize more truth in it) the older you get, but it really works for all ages.

@rrmorton, if you want simple one-step conversion, then use RedFox AnyDVD to disable the copy protection** and either Handbrake or CloneBD to transcode to MP4 or h.265. Both will do a nice job with subtitles and let you choose the audio tracks to include. I like Handbrake for its ability to keep the disc’s original audio format (CloneBD transcodes to Dolby or AAC) and its being free, and CloneBD for its nicer UI and easy ability to preview the content of bonus tracks.

** Please ensure you fly to a country where this is legal beforehand, I am of course in no way encouraging anyone to violate any oppressive copyright laws that just keep you from putting physical media you’ve legally purchased on your home’s streaming server in a way that used to be considered fair use in the good old days goddammit.

In countries where this is all legal and above board, what’s the preferred method of legally archiving some media in late 2021?

Ideally I would like to archive some Blu-rays via my Mac, but whether I use my Mac or my gaming PC laptop I’ll have to buy an external drive, so if you want to throw in a recommendation or cautionary warning on hardware that’s helpful too.

So I need an external Blu-ray drive, the skinny on the preferred software, and also is ripping 4k Blu-rays practical/possible, or is that another level of difficulty? Almost all of what I have now is Blu-ray, but I imagine I’ll end up with more 4k Ultra HD discs in my collection going forward.

  1. MakeMKV to rip.

  2. Handbrake to encode.

  3. Almost certainly need a large-capacity HDD. And likely an external HDD for backup, because god forbid the library you’ve spent years building goes corrupt.

Sorry, I meant I need an external Blu-ray drive. Although yes, also storage drive(s).

Well, I got a case with an optical drive slot just for a blu-ray drive. But, yes, you can get an external blu-ray drive.

I use AnyDVD for Blu-Ray ripping:
https://www.redfox.bz/en/anydvdhd.html

It runs in the background and decrypts while I actually rip/encode with Handbrake.

Are 4K Ultra HD Blu-rays their own can of worms for encryption? At a glance it looks like that’s not a feature in AnyDVD or MakeMKV.

If the answer is just “yeah, don’t worry about that for now”, I can live with that.

I’m actually not sure. I don’t have the space for 60 gig rips, so I never really looked into it.