Computer
Cowboy

A new era of HD quality

Blu-ray has set the bar for quality HD content. With full 1080P resolution and lossless audio Blu-ray is the best way to view movies at home. Unfortunately new advanced technology had also brought us new anti-piracy methods from the studios. Blu-ray requires a secure HDMI/HDCP connection to play at full resolution. Blu-ray also has new disc encryption methods. These heavy handed protection techniques have proven totally ineffective for stopping piracy. I buy Blu-ray because it is the best quality and I enjoy watching movies. What I don’t like is not being able to stream the movies over my home network or play them on a non-HDCP capable computer or display.

Enter Blu-ray ripping.

Fortunately I am not alone in my opinion of fair use of material that I own. There are two great software solutions that can be used to get the movies off the Blu-ray disc onto my home server or portable hard drive. The first is Slysoft’s AnyDVD HD. AnyDVD HD allows me to make a full unencrypted ISO image of any Blu-ray disc. Everything from the original disc is preserved, menus, special features, etc. The unencrypted disc image can be mounted using a virtual drive software tool like Daemon Tools and played back with a Blu-ray software player such as WinDVD BD, PowerDVD, or Total Media Theater. This is a great solution but it is not perfect. Most of the time I don’t really care about the menus, previews and special features and I just want to back up the film in full quality. The easiest solution I have found is a program called MakeMKV. MakeMKV can bypass the encryption on the disc and make a full quality backup of any of the video/audio tracks. The resultant MKV file offers a lot more flexibility when it comes to playback also. Instead of having to mount the ISO and use a software player, I can just play the file in a freeware program such as Media Player Classic Home Cinema or VLC player. Many Blu-ray discs are thirty or forty gigabytes in size, but the actual feature film may be only twenty five gigabytes. I have over a hundred MKV backups, by backing up only the movie part of the disc I have saved around 1.5TB of disc space.

Advanced Techniques

There are other more advanced methods to back up Blu-ray to MKV, for example using AnyDVD HD and eac3to I can demux all the individual tracks that I want from the disc and remux them using MKVtoolnix. It is even possible to rip 3D Blu-ray into dual MKV files (left+audio and right) using SSIF Sucka. I find that the amount of time that it takes to rip 3D Blu-ray is a bit prohibitive especially since Peter Wimmer’s Stereoscopic Player can read the SSIF files right off the disc. Also when a 3D Blu-ray is ripped to dual MKV it usually comes out larger than the original ISO. For example my ISO of Avatar is 46.6GB and my dual MKV rip is 57GB. Blu-ray 3D uses a very cleaver method to save space on the disc, it is call H264 MVC encoding. The full left eye stream is stored on the disc and only the difference or delta right eye stream is stored. When a 3D Blu-ray is ripped the right image MVC delta stream is decoded producing a full copy of the right eye view that is why full quality rip actually comes out larger than the original ISO.