Need help with backing up Bluray - what is the best way

[benderal]

I apologize if there is already a thread for this. I am new to backing up blurays I recently purchased. Can some one tell me or direct to where I would find out the best program to use that would give me the best picture quality I can get and what the settings should be? I am currently using DVDFab where I convert the video into AVI. Not sure if i should doing something else.

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[Kerry56]

Welcome to the forums.

There really isn't a "best" way to back up Blu-ray. To get better advice, you should tell us what formats you want, the type of player you will be using, and approximate sizes you need for playback in your equipment.

DVDFab is having some difficulties at the moment, but it is usually a good program for decryption and transferring the entire movie to the hard drive. Very few of us recommend it for anything else. Another way of decrypting the entire movie to the hard drive is to use MakeMKV in Backup mode. MakeMKV is free to use while in beta, though you do need to put in new beta keys (available at their forum) every month or so.

Once on the hard drive you can work with it using other tools, many of which are free and which have the potential to give much better results than most of the commercial conversion programs. If you can use mp4 or mkv files, I would suggest trying Vidcoder or Handbrake. These programs will re-encode the Blu-ray to smaller file sizes if that is what you want. But trying to advise you on specific settings to use in these programs is foolhardy without knowing what type of equipment you will be using. Many portable devices require different settings than what you would use on a computer, or stand-alone media streamer, or Blu-ray player. Both Vidcoder and Handbrake have many presets designed to work with particular types of equipment, so that would be a good starting point.

[benderal]

Thank you for responding.

I just have a Dell Computer, an internal bluray drive and DVDFab. No other real equipment. Would basically be trying to take the bluray video, convert into another format and put it on a single layer dvd.

[Steve(MS)]

If you have no other "real equipment", then you could rewrap to mkv with makemkv or there are other progs to do that.

But if your terminology is correct and truly want a "dvd" and not a blu-ray backup disc, there are several programs that can accomplish this.
BDRebuilder is very good at this but it requires a little attention setting up and installing several other programs.

[Kerry56]

You can use BD Rebuilder to produce many different types of video from your Blu-ray source. It can make standard definition DVD-video, or high definition mp4 or mkv files. It can also shrink the Blu-ray movie to fit onto a single layer dvd and still be in Blu-ray or AVCHD format.

Vidcoder would be my choice if converting to mp4 or mkv files small enough to fit onto a blank dvd. It has a bit more versatility in its settings.