HOW TO RIP BLU-RAY DISCS FOR LOCAL HOME THEATER PLAYBACK | Pros, Cons, and Detailed Information

so you have a big physical media collection and you want to rip it to a local server [Music] so as much as i give kudos to kaleidoscape i talk about streaming and using my apple tvs and i have a very large itunes library and all that sort of thing there's still plenty of reasons why physical media might might fit into your content source set for your home theater and your entertainment space and so on as great as kaleidoscape is the store isn't infinite not everything is there there's some key things missing and even streaming doesn't have everything although although the itunes store is is pretty darn complete when you go looking for stuff there's still things that aren't there as well and given the long history of it and such there's been quite a lot of content that's come out on physical media that maybe hasn't found its way to being upgraded hasn't found its way to being released in digital and so on and i can also see the perspective of the folks that like to collect because they like to collect the physical thing i thought about that a little bit myself with regards to adding some vinyl to my hi-fi music listening audio setup i certainly don't need it because i want to access or because i need it to access the content i can just pull pretty much any any song album or whatever that i would want to play up on on apple music but there's just something tactile nice and so on deliberate right that goes with having that physical thing having it on your shelf having it around you having it in the environment and going a little bit further i guess you could say than than just the digital realm case in point this is the shallow era godzilla collection that came out on physical media can you get that on kaleidoscape no they don't have it they don't have criterion can you buy these movies on apple itunes mostly they did actually release the master versions of these to apple tv but i don't believe they all have the special features and some of the movies in this set like the godzilla vs king kong specifically i believe aren't aren't available on itunes there's 15 movies in this set not all 15 of those films are still on itunes and this collection is just stellar it's this is this is a coffee table book right that also happens to hold the discs but i don't want to flip those discs i don't want to put those discs in a player if i'm going to have that content available to me i'm used to a kaleidoscape experience i'm used to an itunes experience any amount of physical media that i would like to do i would like to have it ready to play ready to pull up ripped in and available in this type of quality and that's the other actually reason that i've been considering or i'm in the process of maybe adding a little bit of physical media back into my content set since i redid the theater space and i'm kind of upgrading spaces around the house my default methodology has been to to watch on collide escape first as priority assuming it was available and if it wasn't available just accept the itunes copy just accept the streaming copy but i kind of don't want to do that anymore i put a lot more money into my home theater upgraded a lot and even in the living room here i have some plans to to step this system up too if i can avoid it yeah it's nice it's simple it's easy and whatnot but i kind of want those lossless audio tracks and i want the higher video bitrates and that sort of thing i'm back into the back into exploring some level of this diy space i'm going to do this in multiple parts in this video i want to focus just on the idea that i have a disc it has a movie on it how do i get that movie off of that disc in a way that i could put it somewhere on my on my local network in my home and make it accessible to play there's a number of different ways to do that but it basically all starts with needing to have a computer of some sort to be able to get those bits off and you need a drive to be able to put that disk into the drive on your computer break that copy protection and read those bits and so right here in step one phase one is where things already start to go off the rails a little bit for how complex and hassle ridden this whole kind of process is can you go to best buy can you buy a drive off the shelf bring it home plug it into a computer and rip a disc with the right software not really can you go to amazon.com and just freely buy a drive without much care or attention paying much attention to what you're actually buying get it delivered to you from prime in a day or two days plug it in and rip some discs not really so the reality is the drive makers the content owners and all of those folks have been wise to people doing this for a long time and so newer drives have newer versions of firmware that don't allow the same type of disk disk access and such for reading and encryption breaking and all that sort of thing so if you want to take content off of a commercial blu-ray 4k blu-ray and hd blu-ray you need to have the right kind of drive you need to have the right firmware loaded on it in conjunction with using the software that you're actually going to use to read the bits i just acquired this recently again did i buy this off amazon did i just drive up to best buy and grab it no i hopped on forums for popular ripping software and found basically that there's some enterprising individuals out there selling firmware rolled back drives of the right type and the right kinds for reliably being able to to work with the software that people use today to rip their disks this was 170 bucks shipped of course the person providing the service doing the firmware loading and all that sort of thing is taking a little bit of profit i think the drive itself and or the enclosure might have been about 50 bucks less than that so they're not really gouging it too bad they're taking i think a reasonable amount of money to perform a service which is flashing this drive if you want to flash this drive yourself well get your drive get on the forums or develop some windows and linux command line experience if you don't have it and go through the process of trying to find download execute the firmware upgrade and load that firmware yourself but suffice it to say again you're not just grabbing any old drive from any old store putting disks in them and ripping them not anymore you also need to pay a little bit of attention to the fact that some drives are specifically 4k some drives are not but they're uhd friendly because they can read the bdxl format and on and on and on right away again step one before you even get started with the idea of wanting to get something off of a disk know that you're going to have to put in a little bit of effort you're going to have to put in a little bit of research time to make sure that you're getting the right hardware to be able to get those bits off your disks so in this case this is an external but again with the right software it will decrypt and allow for ripping of the bits from a 4k blu-ray disc so step one get your drive step two you kind of need to figure out what exactly how exactly do you want to rip a blu-ray disc a commercially mastered blu-ray disc of course has a whole bunch of content on that desk a whole bunch of stuff it has warnings and trailers and it has the movie in a bunch of different languages it has all the subtitles that go with that movie it might have special features it has the menu system the menu structure artwork and so on that goes with that and you kind of all you really up front need to decide for yourself what do you want when you play that movie do you want the experience of the entirety of the disc as it was with the menus and having to go through the trailers and all the forced things to get in and out of in and out of a piece of content or do you want to try to just get the movie component tree and the bits and pieces of the movie out the main video stream the audio streams that you care about and of course the relevant subtitles there's a couple different ways to accomplish all of that a full disk can be ripped into what's called an iso that means you get one file for the entirety of the disk but of course downstream you're going to need to make sure that you have the right software to rip an iso and you're going to have to have the right playback device and and so on to be able to play that iso if you don't rip the full disk to an iso you have a choice to rip it to a folder structure we call like a bdmv folder structure it's the same stuff just instead of being kind of like compressed and structured into a single file you're basically taking a decrypted copy of all of the files as they are structured into the file system of the disk itself two ways to get the entirety of the disk all of the original content to be able to play with the menus access all those special features and so on and be able to rip in a fairly simpler manner now if you want just the movie prepare to do some work and there's a lot of pitfalls with deciding that you just want to get the movie off the disk in some cases or in many cases i would actually say first you got to further decide well what file do format do i want to put that movie in i would recommend that you jettison any other type of file format out of your mind if you are going to do just a main video main movie rip and just focus on mkv yeah you can do m2ts and you can do mp4s and and but mkv will hold pretty much everything that could come off of a disk you're going to get chapters you're going to get other benefits dolby vision included now choosing to use mkv as your format and one thing that i'll say is anybody that's ripping and basically re-encoding or encoding the lossless format down or compressing the video stream that they get off of a disk to make it smaller i don't know why you would possibly even consider doing that if you're going to if you're going to lose the quality of what you would take off of that disc and serve it to yourself and a player just go to itunes and buy it just go to voodoo and buy it you're making a substandard copy of the thing you might as well just go all digital if you're gonna if you're gonna degrade the quality it is not it is not worth your time anymore streaming is so good it's only getting better you're absolutely just wasting your time so if you're not gonna keep the one to one the one-to-one stuff either in that full disk structure or in that mkv reduction just stop get out done so the reason that i i like those specific formats and my preference would be if you're going to go full disk i prefer an iso over a folder if possible i like only having to move one file around between my computer and my nas and whatnot as well as that mkv being a single file that can contain everything i'm a big fan of keeping things simple trying to maintain consistency and so on and messing with folders all the files and stuff that goes with it i would rather just do an iso so that's my recommendation is full disk grip iso and if i do want to take something and reduce it down mkb is the mkv is the winner there if you want to rip now you need the software to do it there's a variety of different options if you go just searching how do i rip a blu-ray you're going to find a massive amount of shovelware my experience is that you can really reduce down to a handful of really good applications for doing this that include different levels of decryption and the actual act of copying the bits off and packaging them up and that sort of thing there's two main tools that i would recommend that you base your platform on one of them is called any dvd the other is called make mkv both of these tools have been around in this space for a very long time any dvd almost went away a few years ago it kind of it almost got taken down and then it changed some hands and it moved some geo locations and it popped back up and it's been reliably available for some time make mkv has been a constant in this space for as long as i can remember and i've been tinkering with this stuff for about a decade basically since since around the time the playstation 3 came out and i first had the inclination to say oh i can take some stuff off of my dvds and then my blu-rays at the time and actually play them locally from a hard drive to my ps3 and went down this slippery slope for a good while since then but in any case any dvd gives you that direct ability to put a disc into your tray decrypt press essentially one button and rip to your choice of a bdmv folder or an iso very simple very direct very easy make mkv also we'll go into the specifics of mkvs in a little bit but suffice it to say again really great piece of software both of them are technically commercial nad any dvd will cost you some money you can download make mkv for free and use it under their beta that it's been in beta for god knows how long at this time there is a donation structure for it it's 50 bucks if you're going to use the tool and you're going to use it a lot in in going down this road and into this endeavor pay the developers the 50 bucks let them make some money support the development the future availability of the tool and so on pay the 50 bucks unlock it lifetime access easy simple started the process of re-ripping trying to get some content off of disks using the drive that i bought that i showed a couple minutes ago and i wanted to speak to a couple things about the process of it one i was expecting to be able to use the external drive on my 16 inch macbook pro m1 pro and my experience with that was essentially no dice whatsoever i don't know if the usb ports on the device weren't providing the right amount of power i tried a data connection to the laptop and a power connection both to another port on the laptop to a port on the power strip that i have behind my monitor and i encountered nothing but headaches and hassles and read errors in just about every program that i tried given that's a mac i did use them i was trying to use make mkv do some full disk folder backups which you can do bdmv folder backups which you can do in make mkb and i was trying the dvd fob software as well to do a full disk grip into an iso and just flat out no go dvd fob would encounter read errors and go unstable unreliable and not only that but even to get the drive working and dvd fob running on my mac i had to go to some real like bio ish level security access remove some security restrictions which i wasn't really crazy about now since using that software i've got really weird background images on my computer it's not doing the wallpapers like it was before i think as part and parcel of some of the changes that i made to my mac and loading and then unloading that software i requested a refund i didn't find that it was working very well at all i'm probably going to end up completely reinstalling mac os and setting my laptop up from scratch p-i-t-a like i mentioned i want to do iso rips i like the single file i like the packaging of an iso rather than folders so with the the unreliability of using the external drive on the mac and the fact that there's really no good iso software then that i could find because again dvdfab was failing for me i moved the operation over to my wife's computer in our office she's been using and is still using a couple generation old intel nook i5 intel noc 16 gig of ram and so on and i connected both of the usb ports of the drive to the nook and i've actually been ripping reliably there i haven't seen the power related issues mkv specifically on the mac was throwing a lot of errors suggesting power sustained power problems and so on i haven't seen any of that my quick experience here if you're going to set up a ripping operation stick to windows mac os it doesn't have the same software it doesn't have the same tools and it just didn't work very reliably for me maybe also consider whether you're driving your drive off of a laptop versus some more form of a desktop computer that may also introduce some reliability concerns as well i also found too you know you rip a disc a blu-ray you're talking 45 maybe 50 gig or more a uhd blu-ray can go from 60 70 80 up close to 100 gigabytes you need space to store that and so i actually downgraded my macbook to a 500 gigabyte hard drive and with everything else loaded on there the os and so on that's not a lot of room to temporarily store ripped stuff as i take it off a disk and i move it to my server so another thing you gotta gotta consider is what computer are you doing this on is there enough space to to load and process and copy and move all the different files and large files and volume of them that you may be shuffling around as you're doing this so the macbook was kind of a failure so i have had better luck with the intel nok again windows now brings back into the picture the ability to use any dvd there's not a mac version there is a windows version and i've been using any dvd in mk and make mkb kind of in concert with each other those two tools used to be at odds and actually would throw errors and give you warnings if you were running both of them at the same time now because of how the schemas to break the copy protection and such work that they are they're more integrated and i found that actually running the two of them together is kind of the the sweet spot because any dvd doesn't seem to be breaking 4k disk encryption to be able to create the isos it'll do the blu-ray one find itself but make mkv can do the the 4k better and it does it through this concept called libra drive libre once mkb takes care of it any dvd is able to get it and then one click and make the iso and i'll demonstrate that in a moment but one other thing that i wanted to call attention to as you start this process is just the the prolific quantity of discrete errors that you're going to expect as you do this don't expect to simply just take a disc depending on how it was handled where it came from or whatever put it in a drive click that button and walk away and come back in an hour or so because it takes a good hour to to rip a disc and you're going to always have your file i'd say anecdotally throwing out a number i probably see 25 percent of my click and go attempts to result in some kind of a read error so the one thing that you absolutely need to do and plan for is clean your disk even if your disk looks clean it might not be and so i've got some cloths in there do a little and wipe them off other types of cleaners and and so on you want to make sure that that disc is clean and debris is as as clean and debris free as possible you know blow it off lightly get any fibers or lint and such off of there and if you're looking at a disc with some really deep mars or markings and scratches you might just be totally out of luck that that disc might just completely fail to rip and and it's a pain because sometimes when the discrete errors happen you're going to hear that thing spinning and grinding and it's going to go on for minutes sometimes it's able to recover a lot of times it's not most of the time any dvd will throw an error a read error and you'll be able to abort the process delete the file eject it and everything's still stable to go on to your next disk or potentially re-clean that disk and try again i've had a number of times already where a disk failed cleaned it failed again cleaned it again a little more deeper or whatnot and magically the third time was the charm or whatnot so if you're getting a read error you can clean you know clean and try again it's always a strategy if you're getting if you're getting several of the same read errors in a row that disc is probably done you're out of luck it's it's just not going to rip again even pristine looking discs might not always work especially when you're talking about 4k discs there's so much data packed onto a 4k disc that the data density is just it's so tight and it doesn't take much for for for something to get in the way of reading the disc reliably and even a brand new disc out of a freshly sealed packaging should still get wiped off and cleaned and do your best to absolutely protect the the bottom of your disks all right so here we are at my wife's computing station spoiler alert i keep my desk a lot cleaner than she does here i've got a 4k disc this is ready player one you can kind of see i've i've given it a wipe off i've cleaned it up i've got my drive there it's an lg drive and a sold as a buffalo drive there's the nuk the other attachment there is a usb hub that her keyboard and such is attached to let me tell you she's ecstatic about me using her setup for this and and having discs spinning and making noise and all that sort of thing so i've got any dvd loaded up here ready to run and i've got make mkv running so this is how basically i do it like i mentioned you kind of keep both tools running and they'll work together to to take care of making the the disc available to get the stuff off so i'm gonna eject my tray this is a thin external not a full-size external so it's not a slot loader but it is it is a thin tray so i've got this is actually ready player one i'm interested to check this out off of the disc and kind of compare and contrast to the kaleidoscape version so there i've pushed that in we can hear it starting to spin up still waiting as soon as it starts to engage here we'll see some some action on screen there we go any dvd is scanning the disc the disc you have inserted will be available shortly please wait this whole operation might take 20 seconds 45 seconds okay that was actually pretty quick so we take a look at what we got here a summary using the buffalo optical drive gives us a size a volume label aacs protection level and then notice we see here disk supports bus encryption disk wants bus encryption bus encryption disabled by make mkv libre drive failed to send host key removed copy protection etc and so this is where make mkb and any dvd work together and via this libra drive connection i don't know the particulars on how it's working in the background but this is the key to 4k disk access so now it's ready i have any dvd configured to pop up this status window as i mentioned any dvd gives you the ability to rip both to an iso or a folder that's that's what any dvd does in this case i'm choosing to rip to an iso i'm going to rip to the local drive first and then i will copy it to my nas later i do not recommend that you rip directly to your nas because then you're adding the network link the data link of the network between the bits coming off the drive and the bits being written locally you're much more stable i found if you rip to the local drive and then copy later and so we'll get into the particulars of make mkv later but i just want to show here essentially we would click copy disk the process would start takes about an hour maybe a little bit more for a larger 4k disk and best case scenario you come back your iso is sitting there not always but that's the best case all right one more example of this this is studio ghibli movie spirited away go ahead and close that this is a regular blu-ray and we're gonna see kind of similar similar steps here any dvd is scanning the disc a lot of times a regular blu-ray will go a little faster than a 4k and actually i should probably point out the reason that ready player one uh kind of decrypted and was made available so fast is because i had already actually put it in and i think some of the keys and the details are cached in these programs so the next time you put the same disk in it's a it's a bit faster so here we go video blu-ray spirited away acs protected version 63 removed protection notice there's no mention of the liber drive it still is shows up here in make mkv but it's not necessary for these two programs to work in concert when you're talking about just a regular blu-ray so i'm going to dismiss this come up here and copy disk you can hear it spinning up drive light is blinking it'll take a minute to kind of stabilize and and there we are reading about 10 megabytes per second time remaining 117 these aren't always accurate it might take longer if it trips up on something it needs to spin for a while obviously it's going to take longer if it's really able to fly it could take less most progress meters and timers in software actions and what not today are are really approximations so plan a good hour for any given disk so when this finishes i'll have an iso file one single file for this disk sitting on the hard drive of the computer and then i would go forward to copy that to my nas and process metadata so this one's getting a little long already i think i'm going to stop it here and i'm going to follow up with the next video being totally focused on operation of make mkv and looking at a variety of different types of disks with different types of mastering movies and tv shows and talking about a lot of the pitfalls that you encounter if you really want to go down the road of making mkv's versus potentially just going the iso route and so on so i guess the ripping the getting the bits off of the disc piece of this series is going to be two videos and then from there we'll move into how do you store it setting up setting up your actual server and operating an actual server to serve your media and then onward into playback so on so if you have questions please leave them in the comments let me know what you think please like and subscribe and as always thanks for watching

Channel: Techthusiasm

Views: 22,476

Keywords: Home Theater, Audio, Video, AV, Multichannel, 5.1, 11.2, 7.2.4, Speaker, Subwoofer, Preamp, Amplifier, TV, Projector, 4k, UHD, HD, HDR, Dolby Vision, HDR10, Focal, Parasound, Paradigm, Anthem, Triad, Control4, Home Automation, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Switch, Sony, Microsoft, Apple, Apple TV, Kaleidescape, GIK, Acoustic Treatment, Absorption, Diffusion, RowOne, Seymour, Strato, Terra, Arendal, PSA, Rythmik, Synology, DiskStation, Ripping, Discs, Blu-ray, NAS, Local media, DIY media, Network media, MKV, MakeMKV

Id: B_T5eSz-6Tw

Length: 26min 38sec (1598 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2022