How to Rip Blu-Ray – Complete Guide

When you have a large Blu-Ray collection, you’ve already spent a lot on it. Getting a Blu-Ray drive is another expense. When you have to change discs regularly it becomes another bother for a generation who are used to stream movies at the touch of a button. Also, you can use a similar process for ripping DVDs as well. It’s better to Rip your Blu-Ray drives to your computer and watch stream your movies on other devices or you can simply play them on your computer itself using several apps.

To Rip a Blu-Ray drive you don’t need to have any technical information. Just sit back and follow the steps given below and Rip Blu-Ray drives.Below we have provided what all you need to have to perform this successfully. Also, we will guide you on how to Rip the drives inappropriate size as per your need. Also, these are only for Blu Ray drives that contain your own work. More details are provided below.

Warning:

Technically, if any work is copyright protected by the maker then it’s illegal to copy it. Even if you are the owner of it. We do want to encourage the unlawful reproduction or ripping of copyrighted content.

What will you need?

A Blu-Ray drive or DVD: The first thing you need is a Blu-Ray drive that you want to rip. Also, if you have a regular DVD reader then you’ll need to get a Blu-Ray reader. You can get it online easily in around $70-80 or even cheaper. Also, make sure you have enough space on your hard drive to rip the videos you have in Blu-Ray. You can get a separate drive too to store all the content.

MakeMKV App: You will need this app to rip your Blu-Ray in the MKV file format. You can use their free beta app that you can use for a month. And you can even use it after 30 days by getting the latest beta update. This app is available on both Mac and Windows. You can easily download it from their official website here.

Handbrake: Next you will need Handbrake if you want to minimize the size of any long video or movie. If it is a full-length movie then you’ll need more than 10 GB of space for that particular movie itself. MakeMKV rips Blu-Ray movies in their exact sizes. If you have enough space or you want to rip shorter videos then you can skip this step. It is a suggestion that don’t skip this step if don’t have enough space on your computer.

1. Rip Your Blu-Ray With MakeMKV

The main purpose of MakeMKV is to rip any Blu-Ray drive and make a 1080p video in the .mkv format. You can watch the video as it is but you can convert or shrink it if you’d like to. We will discuss that in the latter part of the article while using Handbrake.

Step 1: You need to put the disc you want to rip in the Blu-Ray drive of your computer. Then, open MakeMKV, install it if you haven’t done it yet, and move to the next step.

Step 2: Once MakeMKV opens up wait for a while till you see a Blu-Ray icon as shown in the picture below and click on it.

Step 3: Once the scan is done, you will see a list of all the titles that were scanned from the disc. Select all the titles which you want to rip. Take your time while selecting the titles as this may be confusing in some cases.

Step 4: Also on the same screen on the right, you will see a rectangular box named ‘Output Folder’. This is where you need to specify where the titles will be ripped and copied to. Make sure to select the drives which have plenty of free space.

Step 5: When you are done specifying the destination folder. Next to the same rectangular box, you will see a square box named ‘Make MKV’. Just click the drive icon with a green arrow in the square.

Now you will need to wait for a while depending on the title length. Maximum a longer title may take up to 35 minutes.

You will see a popup which will say ‘Copy complete. x titles saved.’. (x is the number of titles)

If you want to watch the movie right away you just need a player that supports .mkv files like VLC or Kodi. Now if you don’t want to make any modifications to your videos then you don’t have to continue reading this article. Next will understand how you can shrink the titles using Handbrake.

2. Shrink The Titles Using Handbrake

Now that you have ripped the video, you can further minimize if you think the videos are taking up too much space. Just follow the steps given below.

Step 1: Install and launch Handbrake and then choose a bunch of videos together in a folder or select a single video. First, the videos will be scanned for basic details.

Step 2: Once the scan is done, you need to select which titles you want to convert. In the case of a folder, you may see multiple titles. You need to select the Title drop-down in the source section.

Step 3: Next you need to specify that where will these files converted and copied to. Browse and specify the folder where you want these files to be copied.

Step 4: This is where things go a bit technical. Now you need the select the quality settings of your video. You can pick a preset to easily choose the settings. There will be different presets depending on how you of the video you want to restore.

Here are the few presets you’ll get for shrinking your videos:

Low quality and lower resolution preset: If you are critical of space or don’t care much about the quality of the video then you should select the preset. The Very Fast 720p30 preset in the low-quality preset section is perfect for you.

High quality and lower resolution preset: This is perfect if you want to reduce the file size a bit without compromising too much of the quality. This preset in 720p files with the least compressions means the video will look much better than most 1080p videos. Use the HQ 720p30 Surround preset for the best results. You can use this preset for movies that lack the quality of a modern movie or content which doesn’t have many high-quality visuals.

High quality and high resolution preset: If you don’t want to sacrifice the quality of the videos even then you should choose one of these presets. This preset will give you a high-quality 1080p so that you can enjoy special effects. The Super HQ 1080p30 preset is perfect. Also if you’d like to get better sound quality then go to the Audio section. Then change the ACC dropdown to whichever is the original audio for the video, either AC3 or DTS.

Step 5: Now once you have specified a preset, you can change more settings in the Audio, Video, and Subtitles tab. You can increase or decrease any aspect of the video further if you want to.

Step 6: Once you have specified all the details, the next thing you need to do is choose the video file format. Under the ‘Container’ section you can choose MKV or MP4. MP4 is much more compatible with other devices too and you get a slightly better video quality in the MKV format.

Step 7: Once all set click on the Start Encode button and sit back. Once the videos are ready, check them. If the new video is satisfying enough you can delete the original rip video to save space. Also, you can add more videos to the queue similarly and start converting once the existing one is complete.