The Home Tech Place

Ripping

Blu-ray DVD’s are an entirely different ball of wax.  For home theater purposes, we need to look at them a bit differently than we do for regular DVDs.  First of all, there is the size element.  While a regular DVD will take around 7 GB give or take on your hard drive, it is not uncommon for a Blu-ray DVD to occupy in the neighborhood of 40GB.  Can we save space by compressing a Blu-ray DVD the way we compress regular DVDs?  The question is not whether we can, but instead, “why would we want to?”  The whole point of the Blu-ray format is to provide a high quality audio and video experience.  Since compression really reduces the quality of both the audio and video streams, compressing a Blu-ray DVD does not make sense.   For this reason, I have not been able to find any programs that purport to compress Blu-ray movies, but in truth, I have not really looked all that hard since I couldn’t see anyone wanting to do it.  After all, if you want to make a compressed version of a movie, you’d just rip the regular DVD version.  It would also take a lot less time for a ripping/compression program to chew through 7 GB than it would to get through 40 GB.

A second consideration is the tradeoff between the cost of a Blu-ray DVD and the cost of the hard disk space a ripped Blu-ray DVD would occupy.  A check of NewEgg.com offered a Western Digital 1.5 TB drive for $110.  This works out to a storage cost of about $3 give or takes to store a 40 GB Blu-ray DVD image versus only 51 cents to store a 7 GB DVD movie image.  Since you want to protect your ripped movies, you would probably use a mirrored drive that would double the cost the space taken, so the Blu-ray would cost $6 to store versus a little over $1 for the regular DVD version. This may not seem like much, but it means your 1.5 TB drive will only hold about 35 Blu-ray movies give or take.  This is a consideration of sorts if you plan to build a large movie collection since most consumer level NAS devices top out at about 4 times the largest available hard drive, which works out to about 8 TB at the time of this writing.  Granted, it’s probably not as big a factor as it might have once been as hard drives get ever larger, but it is something to consider nonetheless.

Fortunately, your ripping process is going to be very similar to the one used for regular DVDs, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind.  First of all, you are going to need to use the more expensive version of Slysoft’s AnyDVD – AnyDVD HD, which is 30 Euros more than the basic version you used for ripping regular DVDs.  Fortunately, Slysoft offers purchasers of the regular AnyDVD version a 30 Euro upgrade option to the HD one, so there’s no real cost associated with buying the cheaper non-HD version and then upgrading to the HD one at a later date.  Secondly, while you will use the same My Movies program to perform the rips as you did with your regular DVDs, you are not going to be able to do it for nothing anymore.   While the basic version of My Movies is free, certain advanced features are only available to people who have contributed to the My Movies project.  Ripping Blu-ray or HD-DVD movies is considered an advanced feature.

My Movies works on a “pay to play” scheme that awards points for contributions which can take two forms; cash contributions via PayPal and contribution of movie information to the My Movies Internet database.  As you may have noticed when you first fired up My Movies and put a DVD in it, chances are that it recognized the DVD and when you did the rip, it populated the movie file will all kinds of background information and created a JPG file of cover art.  All of this information comes from users like you.  Users are awarded points for contributing this sort of information to the database.  Check out the My Movies website for information as to what each type of contribution is worth.  It is entirely possible to amass enough contribution points simply by contributing information and thus get the full functionality of the program for free.  In the interest of time, I took the fast track and made cash contribution to unlock the Blu-ray ripping features.  The cash cost for Blu-ray ripping functionality is $50.  One nice thing however, is that the My Movies folks offer a free 21-day trial of the software with 2,500 points enabled.  This lets you try out all of the features to see if you are going to use them before you commit the cash.  It is also important to note that you can use either or both methods to build up your contribution level, so if you have the time, you don’t have to pay for all of the points needed.

In the end, consider this – the developers of the program work pretty hard and it does some really amazing things.  I, for one, have no problems with kicking some money to people like that to keep them writing cool software

As with regular DVDs, you have the option to rip your Blu-ray titles to either File Structures or ISO files.  In contrast to regular DVDs however, the recommendation when dealing with Blu-ray movies is to use the ISO format.  There are a couple of good reasons for this recommendation.  As of right now, there are no standalone hardware players that I am aware of that are capable of playing back a ripped Blu-ray DVD in any format, thus the argument we used for using File Structures for regular DVDs – namely that hardware players support it – doesn’t apply here.  The second reason that I recommend using the ISO format for Blu-ray ripping is that today, you need to use a third party Blu-ray player program to play a ripped Blu-ray DVD since Windows does not offer a native Blu-ray playback support  as part of the Operating System.  There are three major players in the Blu-ray playback market right now (we’ll cover them in detail in the next section on Playback) and all three are capable of playing a file in ISO format., but only one of the three is capable of playing back a File Structure Blu-ray rip.  You will need one other piece of software that mounts the ISO image, but we’ll cover that as well in the Playback section.

Assuming you have sufficient contribution points, ripping a Blu-ray DVD using My Movies is no different from ripping a regular DVD.  You can choose to rip it either from the Collection Management interface or from the My Movies strip inside of Windows Media Center.   If you choose to use the Media Center method, all you have to do is to choose the Copy DVD option from the My Movies strip.  Choosing this will prompt you for the drive/directory where you want to copy to go.  By default, My Movies only supports the root level of your drive however you can configure subdirectories by changing the options in the My Movies collection management application that you can access via the Collection management tray application on your Windows desktop.  Choose options from the tools menu and select the Media Center Disc copy option.  Towards the bottom you will see a box labeled Target Folders.  You can then click the Add button and add any folder you like.  Note that you will need to have already created the folder as My Movies does not give you the option to create one.

Once you have chosen the destination, click OK and then simply sit back and wait.  Depending on the speed of your Blu-ray drive, you should probably plan on roughly a 1:1 ratio between the movie’s length and its copy time.  So, a one hour movie will take roughly 1 hour to copy, a two hour movie, two hours, etc.  Since you are doing an uncompressed rip, there is not much processing going on here, so the speed of your CPU and number of processor cores really won’t have much bearing on your ripping speed.