Contemplating ripping my Blu ray collection

About 2 years ago I pretty much stopped buying physical media and started mostly just watching Netflix and other online media outlets for my entertainment needs.

I have about 200 Blu rays and maybe another 500 DVDs and I'm thinking I want to box them up and put them in the crawlspace but before I do that, I'd like to rip them and setup a media server so I still have easy access to my collection through my PS3, PC, Vita, android tablet, etc.

I know Tested used to have a guide on DVD, but I'm wondering if this is possible with Blu rays; I'm not concerned with preserving ultra high blu ray quality, just something nice that I can stream around the house.

Are there particular blu ray drives that should be avoided, or will any drive work?

What software is recommended?

Any other considerations that I haven't thought of?

I've never used Blu-Ray drives, but I have used ripping software to archive my movies. While I never used a Blu-Ray ripping package, I purchased DVDFab Gold back in the day and it worked very well.

http://www.dvdfab.com/blu-ray-copy.htm

And a caveat to the mods: I know ripping owned media for personal use is still technically illegal, so I'll understand if this gets edited or deleted.

Do it. I love XBMC on my home theater and Plex on my iPad, Android devices is nifty too.

I bought a cheap $50 samsung blu-ray drive a few years back. As long as you can read the disc, you should be good.

I use MakeMKV. It's free while in beta and it's been in beta for... forever. Right now, the code listed is good until January 2013.

http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1053

Once it goes out of beta, you'll need to buy it.

Handbrake to encode the rip so you're not sitting on 30 gig raw dumps.

You'll need hard drive space and a lot of it. I recommend Western Digital Red drives, and I do believe they come in 3 TB sizes.

Time. It takes a while to rip the blu-ray but it takes a long time to encode it in handbrake. Depending on the settings, it can take my 4.6ghz i5 overnight to do a movie, or it can take under an hour. It all depends on the quality I want.

The only issue I have is I can't get forced subtitles to work. Right now, it's all or nothing and I've just been too lazy to play around with settings.

If you plan on viewing blu-ray rips on your PS3/vita/iOS device, your computer will most likely be doing the transcoding, so you'll want something fairly beefy. If you plan on having multiple devices streaming from your media server at once, you'll want to make sure you're not running some POS 100mbit dlink switch.

I don't have the advice you're looking for. I recently donated hundreds of DVDs to local value village, whole hog, just got rid of the entire collection.

The reasons were simple, I never really used any of them, and moving every few years for work it became more and more obvious that the movies were not coming out of their respective boxes often enough.

Before going into the long process of ripping DVD/BluRays and put them onto a digital storage. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Am I really, really, going to need to watch this move on a moments notice?
2. If I do, will it be on netflix/Hulu/Amazon prime?
3. If I have to pay $0.99 to rent the movie to watch it once, am I okay with that?
4. Is the many hours of time it will take to rip all the movies without worth? What is the cost to buy storage for all of these movies?

I went through my collection and ended up keeping the 10 or so movies that I might actually watch again and left the rest of the stuff exist on internet streaming sources.

@Salarn said:

I don't have the advice you're looking for. I recently donated hundreds of DVDs to local value village, whole hog, just got rid of the entire collection.

The reasons were simple, I never really used any of them, and moving every few years for work it became more and more obvious that the movies were not coming out of their respective boxes often enough.

Before going into the long process of ripping DVD/BluRays and put them onto a digital storage. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Am I really, really, going to need to watch this move on a moments notice?
2. If I do, will it be on netflix/Hulu/Amazon prime?
3. If I have to pay $0.99 to rent the movie to watch it once, am I okay with that?
4. Is the many hours of time it will take to rip all the movies without worth? What is the cost to buy storage for all of these movies?

I went through my collection and ended up keeping the 10 or so movies that I might actually watch again and left the rest of the stuff exist on internet streaming sources.

Did you end up even watching one of those 10 movies? I remember thinking about doing the same and never even rewatched the movies I picked.

MakeMKV is what a lot of people use. I have not had much luck doing Blu-Rays, but I use Handbrake for DVDs which has Blu-Ray support. I would recommend grabbing a nightly build since it has the latest features and they are slow to release.

I don't know if you have looked into hard drive space though. Blu-Ray sizes are huge depending on the quality you set. Especially if you are looking at doing constant quality versus an average bitrate. A few months ago I purchased a QNAP 419 NAS and 4 2TB drives. That was around $1,000. I don't know what your real plans are for movie quality, but I can tell you that on average I am getting 2GB a DVD. Some are only 1.5GB and others are 4GB (older movies or movies with lots of noise). With Blu-Ray your sizes will definitely be larger if you go a little larger than standard definition (anything wider than 480) and also the Audio is of a much higher quality.

My Blu-Ray experience is limited because the machine I use to rip is always busy doing other things and I am still in the process of just doing DVDs. I'll know more once that is done and get a cheap Blu-Ray drive for this computer otherwise I am forced to use my laptops internal drive.

you want to fart on your movies? that sounds awful!

No but really it might be hard due to all the DRM.

@banishedsoul1 said:

you want to fart on your movies? that sounds awful!

No but really it might be hard due to all the DRM.

That's why you buy AnyDVD =)

@Jams: So far I've re-watched 3 of the 10

Matrix, Ironman, Lord of the Rings

@Salarn said:

I don't have the advice you're looking for. I recently donated hundreds of DVDs to local value village, whole hog, just got rid of the entire collection.

The reasons were simple, I never really used any of them, and moving every few years for work it became more and more obvious that the movies were not coming out of their respective boxes often enough.

Before going into the long process of ripping DVD/BluRays and put them onto a digital storage. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. Am I really, really, going to need to watch this move on a moments notice?
2. If I do, will it be on netflix/Hulu/Amazon prime?
3. If I have to pay $0.99 to rent the movie to watch it once, am I okay with that?
4. Is the many hours of time it will take to rip all the movies without worth? What is the cost to buy storage for all of these movies?

I went through my collection and ended up keeping the 10 or so movies that I might actually watch again and left the rest of the stuff exist on internet streaming sources.

I did the same thing with my somewhat small collection the last time I moved. My movie collection now fits in a shoebox and it's titles that I actually watch once a year. I don't need that stuff. I don't want to deal with it anymore. It doesn't make me happier.

It's definitely possible. lifehacker has a tutorial on this, also Tekzilla would probably have something either in an old episode or in their forums about how to go about it since they are huge advocates of this type of stuff and do it themselves. The only thing that has really stopped me personally from doing it is that my computer is super old at this point so it would take forever. Once I build a new machine though, this will end up being one of the first things I do with my collection XD

It is known that Pavtube Blu-ray is a good choice which rip Blu-ray discs as well as DVD discs.I really appreciate is conversion speed and output video quality

In my opinion, ripping your blue ray collection would be a waste of time. Enjoy your physical disks and spend that time on more productive pursuits.