I hate physical media because I don’t have enough space in my apartment to store them. Earlier, I used to rip the legally purchased DVDs and Audio CDs to my computer and store in an external hard drive. Storing in external HDD helps a lot when we need to watch movies or listen to music on various devices. I have a PS3, a Macbook, a Windows 7 PC and a Windows 7 HP netbook, so ripping movies make total sense.
The problem these days is that High Definition movies are released on Blu-Ray discs, so ripping and storing them is not an easy task. But I have mastered the trick by trying various methods, so I will try to explain you in easy simple steps on how to rip Blu-Ray movies, and make those files compact enough for storage. Blu-Ray rips can take up to 50 GB of your HDD space, so making them smaller without losing the quality is very important.
How to Rip Blu-Ray Movies?
Required things before we proceed: A Blu-Ray drive in your Computer (even external will do), a Blu-Ray Media (Movie Disc), and an external HDD (if you don’t want to save the resulting movie file in your computer).
1. You need to download an App which can rip the Blu-Ray media to your HDD. So visit MakeMKV, download the software, for either Windows or Mac, and install.
2. Open the MakeMKV application, and insert the Blu-Ray disc.
3. The application will recognize the disc and start scanning. If you have a slow computer, it might take some time, so don’t panic.
4. Once the App finishes scanning, it will present with list of available content on the disc.
5. Now select the item which has the largest file size, and deselect the rest.
6. You would find option for selecting Audio and Subtitles when you select the title. Just chose what you want and deselect the ones which are not required.
7. Since the output file is going to be really huge, make sure you select the drive with huge free disk space..
8. Hit the Make MKV button, and go watch your daily soap on TV, because it’s going to take at least 2 hours to finish.
9. The App will save the ripped Blu-Ray movie as MKV file in the location you have specified earlier.
10. Since the MKV file is going to be in the range of 40-50GB, we have to reduce the size using another application. So visit the Handbrake site, download and run the app.
11. Now select the saved MKV file as the source, and set the output folder to where you want the new compressed movie file to be saved. You can either choose your computer’s HDD or an external HDD for convenience of watching on any device.
12. If you want high quality movie, select “High Profile”, else select “Normal Profile” by clicking toggle preset. High profile format will result in bigger file size. So decide on what you need – size or quality.
The above method should work for computers running Windows and Mac OS X. Rip those Blu-Ray movie discs in High Definition to your computer or External HDD, and enjoy watching on any device such as PS3, Xbox 360 or Apple TV.
