The Last DVD and Blu-Ray Ripping Guide You'll Ever Need
Rip and Copy Blu-Ray Movies
What You Need
After you point Ripbot at your Blu-ray disc, you'll need to tell it what video and audio content you want it to extract.
Ripping Blu-ray discs to a more portable format is neither easy nor cheap. While there are some free Blu-ray decryption tools, they don’t work on newer discs and they require constant fiddling to work. Lucky for you, we’ve got a Blu-ray ripping solution that produces a 1080p H.264-encoded MP4 file that’s around half the size of Blu-ray. But even with our step-by-step instructions, it’s not a foolproof process. Rips typically take five hours, and it can take a couple of tries to get perfect results. Still interested? Then let’s get started.
First, you’ll need to download and install AnyDVD HD, Ripbot264, and the software Ripbot needs to run—if you run Ripbot and your PC is missing the required software, it provides a page with links to the correct versions of MKVSplitter, ffdshow, and Avisynth. If you have any codec packs installed, it’s a good idea to remove them before you install ffdshow. In our testing, Ripbot is much more reliable when codec packs are absent.
Once you’ve installed all the apps, it’s time to drop a Blu-ray disc in your drive and get started. Load Ripbot (the version we tested has a bug that requires you to open the ffdshow Video Decoder
Configuration app and change the setting for VC-1 on the Codecs menu from libavcodec to wmv9, but this issue should be fixed by the time you read this), click the Add button in the lower-right corner of the app, and browse to your BD-ROM drive. Go to the BDMV/STREAM directory and select the largest *.mt2s file in the folder. Ripbot will parse that file (and all the others on the disc) to find the feature film. Once it’s done, check the available options under Playlist and find the one that matches the runtime of your movie. You can usually stick with the default Chapters setting, but you’ll want to make sure you have the 1080p selection on Video and the first English language selection on Audio. Subtitles are tricky. Like DVDs, Blu-ray movies use forced subtitles to display English translations of other languages as they are spoken onscreen. If there’s more than one English subtitle option for a particular disc, you typically want to use the first one. Once you’ve made your choices, press OK. Ripbot will extract the files it needs to the hard disk, which usually takes at least 30 minutes.
The next screen lets you adjust the file you’re creating. You can tweak everything from the cropping settings to the audio format. We typically use the Console profile for video and 2.0 channel AAC, but if you want to use the file with an Apple device, you’ll need to choose the appropriate profile. Default settings are generally fine here as well. Choose your output filename and press the Start button in the lower-right corner of the screen to queue your rip. Once the rip is queued, you can remove the disc from the drive—it won’t be needed again.
The Encoding screen lets you configure the output. Choose your target profile and then tweak the settings to suit your needs.
If you want to convert more than one disc at a time, you can queue more. However, we typically rip one disc at a time. Each disc takes a long time to complete and the entire process can be touchy. Press Start to begin, and in a few short hours you’ll have a fantastic-looking (and completely unencrypted) rip of your Blu-ray disc.