In the past, there are many articles and discussions about ripping your DVDs in order to watch them on an iPhone or an Apple TV. The most-recent version of iToolSoft DVD Ripper makes it pretty easy.
All of the stuff we've covered is great for ripping standard DVDs, but unfortunately none of those applications works with Blu-ray discs. Now that Blu-ray players are becoming more common in the living room, so are the Blu-ray movies we watch on them.
To see if I could
rip Blu-ray disc, I downloaded a
Blu-ray ripper for free trial, a
Blu-ray-ripping application for OS X and Windows. I borrowed a PC with Blu-ray dive from my friend Susan, inserted a Blu-ray disc, then start the Blu-ray ripping.
The software immediately found my USB-connected drive, and let me read the Blu-ray disc inside. It then presented me with a list of titles, each with a file size next to it. The first title was the main movie-easy to tell because it listed the number of chapters and also displayed the largest file size of the group at 35GB. Clicking the disclosure triangle next to that title showed me the various audio and subtitle tracks contained in the movie, and let me deselect those I didn't want. I then clicked the Make MKV button and, about an hour and a half later, ended up with a 31.79GB .mkv file on my hard drive.
This Blu-ray ripper basically strips the copy protection from movies and then copies them into the container. The result is a perfect copy of the movie, at its original frame size and data rate, which I was able to play on my Mac Pro using the free VLC media player. Unlike other ripping tools,
iToolSoft does support transcoding and if you want to watch the movie on your iPhone or Apple TV, say, you'll need not to convert it with a separate app to complete the
Blu-ray ripping process.
Another app I found, usually referred to as
Blu-ray Ripper for Mac, appears on many different websites with different names from different companies. It's early days for Blu-ray ripping, especially on the Mac, but it does seem like there's progress being made to let us enjoy our purchased movies on our other devices, regardless of format.
