How to make a lossless rip?

[Poro]

Hey!

Now that I got my home theater system installed (projector + proper speakers), I would like to start ripping some blu-rays so I can watch some movies on it. How would I go on about making a lossless blu-ray rips? I'd hope that the subtitles are optional, not encoded in to the video so that I can disable them if I want. Which programs are needed to do this? I've read some guides but most of them seem to have somekind of lossy quality used.

So how would I do this and which software do I need?

Thanks in advance!

[hech54]

AnyDVD HD - a "rip" is lossless.

[Poro]

Hmm, I guess I wasn't clear enough. I'd also like to utilise some kind of a lossless compression (for example when ripping musci, you would use FLAC). How would I do this? I guess I'll try AnyDVD HD for the ripping process.

[jagabo]

The video and audio on the DVD are already compressed. In this case, a "lossless rip" means no further compression, just copying the data from the DVD to the computer. You cannot compress more without losing quality -- because you have to uncompress the data (your typical 90 minute movie would be around 70 GB uncompressed), then recompress it. If you recompress it with a lossless codec the result will be much larger than the rip. If you recompress with a lossy codec you can get a smaller files size but there will be some loss of quality. If you use (lossy) h.264 compression you can reduce the size to 1/2 to 1/4 without much loss of quality.

Audio CDs can be losslessly compressed because the data on the CD is uncompressed to start with.

[Poro]

Thanks for the answer jagabo! That was very enlightening. I guess the same applies for blu-ray movies?

[redwudz]

Yes. If you don't mind huge hard drive files, just rip the whole BD to your HDDs. Or you can use a program like RipBot to shrink down the main movie file size with some quality loss. I also use a projector with a large screen and backup my BD discs to about 8.5GB files. They still look very good. Or you can try BD Rebuilder if you want to retain the menus and extras and still have manageable sizes. The downside is this takes a fair amount of time, 5 - 12 hours or more, depending on your PCs capabilities.

The main movie on a BD averages about 23GB, so you would need a lot of HDD space just for that. The whole disc size varies, but can be up to 50GB or so.