New here, Mac user, wanting to learn to rip.

[BluLoo]

I will not get into the why or when, but I have just bought my first BD-R drive and wish to know a few things. The first and most important being how do I "rip" the contents of the disc into a form that I can burn to a BD-R later? Are ISO images the best way to go, as was the case with DVD? I did try looking in the guides, but I found the guides section a little difficult to navigate for what I wanted. On a similar note, where is a good place in Australia to get BD-R media? I went to every computer store in my local area... depressing experience to say the least.

[jman98]

I will not get into the why or when, but I have just bought my first BD-R drive

Starting off all defensive is probably not your best plan around here. I don't see how it's relevant anyway as I really don't think anybody cares why or when you did this. You could have just started with "I have just bought...".

I know only that your options under Mac are quite limited. You need Mac specific help. I will ask a moderator to move your post to the Mac forum so you'll have a better chance of getting an answer. I have no idea where you can buy BD media at in Australia. Maybe you can look online. The best North American sellers are online. Maybe it's the same in the Land of Oz.

As to whether ISO is best or not, that depends on your goal. If you want to shrink your rips from dual layer to single layer, then certainly not, but that's going to be tough on Mac anyway. I can tell you that Total Media Theater is the only commercial BluRay player that allows ISO play and all the others have caved in and don't allow ISOs to be directly played (you can do some trickery by mounting the ISO as a fake disc drive under Daemon Tools to get around this). I don't keep up with Mac BD stuff so I don't know what your options are there, but they're quite limited compared to Windows.

[johns0]

Thread moved to the mac forum where you can get more help.

[Ai Haibara]

You might try the OS X version of DVDFab HD Decrypter. I believe it should be able to rip Blu-Ray, like the Windows version. (Unfortunately, I haven't really looked into the OS X version, because I don't have an external Blu-Ray drive I can connect to my Mac, and the only optical drive I have on my Mac is a riplocked Superdrive, so I don't usually do much ripping on it. ) Offhand, I'm not aware of anything else that can be used to rip Blu-Ray under OS X.

I'm not sure what you might use to play physical Blu-Ray discs on OS X. VLC handles Blu-Ray to an extent, though I think it doesn't support things like BD menus. There have been a handful of $30-40 shareware/commercial software players appearing in recent months, although they're questionable, and at least one of them (MacGo's Blu-Ray Player) has been declared by VLC's developers as an unauthorized repackaging of VLC.

VLC should work for playback of the ripped discs, though I'd expect it to have the same kind of 'restrictions' playing a ripped BD, as it would a physical disc.

(Edit: The comments about playing BDs/BD rips actually stemmed from jman's comments, not the OP's. )

[orsetto]

To do anything with BD beyond simple playback, you'll eventually be forced to either get a separate cheap PC, or reconfigure your Mac to dual-boot so it can run under Windows for tasks like this that are Windows-specific (for all practical purposes). Apple has pretty much deadwalked away from video work on Mac, disc formats especially: software to work with DVD is limited, for BD almost nothing (and even less OS support for BD).

Utility with DVD and BD is one of the sacrifices one makes in exchange for whatever advantages Mac offers in other fields you may find useful. Each platform has tradeoffs, those who don't want to rely 100% on Windows still often find it a "necessary evil" in certain areas.

[BluLoo]

Okay. First, I will just apologise for starting off on a defensive note. My real-life conversations unfortunately have made doing so an instinct to me, so please do not take it personal. I am always guarded about exactly what I say because I want to give people the least amount of chance to twist it into something it is not.

Having said all of that, what has thus far been said confirms my worst fears and my low opinion of Apple the corporation. You know how it goes, great products, bad idiots making them, and all that junk. I will continue to hack away at answers, of course, but I will likely not be even bothering to try to run Windoze on my machine. A certain "related" individual asked me if I could do that once as if I was stupid for not even thinking about trying. Given that this person could suggest to breathe and I would stop doing so out of spite, well, you get the idea.

Now, I will give DVDFab HD a go and see what happens, of course. But there are a couple of follow-up questions I would like to go through in the meanwhile.

I want to make either "shrunk" or 1:1 duplicates of discs and play them back on my home theatre setup. Is this possible to do at all yet? Do the presently-available methods for ripping work with this goal?

And thanks for all the info provided so far. Apologies also for use of the wrong forum. It has been a while, let us say.

[jman98]

DVDFab HD should (hopefully) have the ability to shrink rips, but as I've never used the Mac version, I can only tell you that the Windows version supports this so the Mac should. We have an excellent free program under Windows called BDRebuilder that can do this, but there's no Mac version of it. Maybe Toast has the ability to do this too, but you'd have to check yourself on what Toast can do. I hate Roxio products with a passion and I'm not sure I'd use them if given free copies.

If you have a question involving Macs, 99 times out of 100 it needs to go in our Mac forums. If in doubt, put it there. Mac forum questions have a special symbol that shows up in the subject on the main page here that lists current active threads and we have Mac experienced members who look for it.

[Hoser Rob]

Ripping BD's is more complex than dvd's and you may need a wider selection of tools than dvdfab. Running a virtual Windows machine may be a better Mac solution.

[MacDSL]

If Ripping and/or Burning Blu-Ray's is what you are looking to do. You have to get a PC. Apple sees Blu-ray as a dying format. Right or wrong, Apple is getting out of the Optical Disk business as fast as they can. I believe that almost everything they ship no longer contains Optical Drives (Maybe just the Mac Pro? And, that might change soon) I don't think they are never going to officially support Blu-Ray, so there's no incentive for anyone to write any BD tools for it. FCPX does not seem to support writing to it, I don't think Apple will spend time creating anything for BD.

If it's something you are going to rarely do, a Virtual PC might work, the Windows tools are better, and more prevalent. If it's something you see yourself doing for years to come, it might be worth it to just invest in a dedicated PC for the task.

Apple just never wanted anything to do with BD or HD DVD. I believe it thought both were dying formats.

[JimmyS]

FCPX does not seem to support writing to it, I don't think Apple will spend time creating anything for BD.

FCP X does support Blu-ray. This is from FCP X's format and I/O specs. You do need an external BR writer though.


"Export and burn DVD, AVCHD disc, and Blu-ray disc."


After looking at FCPs docs, it looks as though this is through the Compressor app. add on. Still part of FCP X though.

[MacDSL]

DOH!
I still don't think Apple is going to be supporting it much. And they do seem to be getting out of the optical Media support as fast as they can. I still say in the long run, the OP should get a PC instead if he is going to be doing Ripping and Burning of Blu-Ray Disks.

But, thank you for checking on my assertions. I stand corrected..

[phase52001]

The first and most important being how do I "rip" the contents of the disc into a form that I can burn to a BD-R later?

I use MakeMKV. This will allow you to backup your BLURAY disk in full, or extract the contents as seperate MKV files with multiply audio tracks and subtitles intact. If you want you can burn these MKV files straight back to a Bluray disc. Works fine, and quiet straight forward. No menus using this method of course. Everything you need to know about it is here: http://www.makemkv.com It's works with DVDs as well.

And you can use HANDBRAKE to the reduce the size of the MKV file to anything you want.eg: 35Gb to 20Gb or 4.4Gb.

Or if you prefer there is a Mac version of DVDFAB available: http://www.dvdfab.com (As mentioned above).
Not sure what DVD Ripper you use to make backups, but here's my preferred option: http://www.macdvdripperpro.com

On a similar note, where is a good place in Australia to get BD-R media? I went to every computer store in my local area... depressing experience to say the least.

I know your pain. I gave up on computer stores years ago. Go here: http://www.pcx.com.au Lots of media to choose from, good prices and they'll ship to where you are, or as you're in Sydney you can order online and pickup if you prefer.

Hope that helps.