Hardware- Software

[StephenBB81]

I have started to buy Blu-Rays over DVD's because of title availability.
I'm a laptop user have many laptops some with some without optical drives, and usually RIP my new purchases onto my portable harddrive for traveling.

I don't plan to buy a new notebook with a BluRay Drive, so I come here for a few bits of advice.
Are there drives better than others for Ripping? I recall back in my University days different CD Rom drives were better for getting around copy protection, is this still the case?
Please make suggestions


I've read a few Ripping guides, and I'm leaning toward using http://makemkv.com/ and http://handbrake.fr/ as the softwares of choice for my needs, Unless better suggestions can be made,


Any advice for dealing with Blu Ray RIP's I realize the file sizes will be very large, any media player softwares recommended for playing RIP's?

I'm Windows 7 PC based as an FYI

[aedipuss]

the only difference in blu-ray drives would be the read speed. you need anydvd or dvdfab for all of them. check cdfreaks.com for reviews. mkv is fine.

[hello_hello]

I usually run AnyDVD in the background while effectively ripping the disc with MeGUI. With AnyDVD doing the decrypting, I run MeGUI's HD Streams Extractor (from the tools menu) and use it to open the file containing the movie (usually the largest m2ts file on the disc). The HD Streams Extractor will extract the video to an MKV file and it'll also extract/convert the desired audio stream(s).
Once it's done, I re-encode the video using MeGUI, generally adding the original audio without converting it.

The advantage of doing it that way is not having to rip the entire disc, which can save a bit of time. There's probably lots of other ways to achieve the same end result, but that's mine....