Starting point

[Douglasfirs]

howdy all,

A little intro. Used to digitize my movies back in the DVD days. Bluray came along and never jumped shit to digitize BD. Just kept buying them. Over the years. My collection between dvds and blurays is around 1000+ discs. Ive since offloaded all the movie cases in storage but have all the discs in sleeves in giant cases at my house. I recently purchased the infuse app and stream all my digitized media that way which I am enjoying a lot. Convenience!

My plan over the next year is to digitize my entire collection and sell off all my blurays and keep the rare stuff, etc. I have a 4 year old and an2 month old. Storagw and space is everything with 2 kids. So I'm selling off everything.

My wife already gave me the OKAY to purchase a Bluray drive so I can digitize. Yay!

And thats where I currently am. Way back when it seemed ripping dvds was easy. No errors. Just used my external Mac drive. Easy easy. Now it seems there is encryption. Discs are protected. You need certain software for the drive, etc. And that stuff is over my head. Ive been trying to scrub the forums but there is just sooooo much and its hard to sort through.

Is there a good starter thread that anyone can recommend that's up to date and on where to start?

I have an iMac running the latest macOS software. I need to purchase a BD drive to rip my entire collection. Does insert and rip even exist anymore or do you need to flash software on the drive these days, etc. to get around copyrighted protection? I don't want to spend over $100 if that's doable.

I have 6 external HDs, so storage isn't an issue. In the last 15 years I haven dove into special features so the only thing I really need to rip is the movie and optional subtitles I guess.

Help me MKV kenobi, you're my only hope!

[megaspaz]

Bluray drives:
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/optical ... uperdrives

Software:
https://download.videolan.org/libdvdcss/1.4.2/macosx/
http://makemkv.com/download/
https://handbrake.fr/rotation.php?file= ... g&old=true

If you want to be able to rip & encode to *.mp4 or *.m4v at the same time (handbrake), then you need to run these commands in Terminal.app:

Code: Select all

mkdir ~/lib
ln -s /Applications/MakeMKV.app/Contents/lib/libmmbd_new.dylib ~/lib/libaacs.dylib
ln -s /Applications/MakeMKV.app/Contents/lib/libmmbd_new.dylib ~/lib/libbdplus.dylib

If you don't care about encoding *.mp4 or *.m4v, you don't need handbrake.
If you don't care about encoding to *.mp4 or *.m4v at the same time as ripping, you can just get the latest version of handbrake.
Also, you could install install 2 versions of handbrake if you want to -> the current version and 1.2.0

Edit:

Nice to have software:
https://mkvtoolnix.download/downloads.html#macosx

For manipulating/configuring mkv files...

[preserve]

1) Download MakeMKV

2) Rip

3) Buy more HDs

Unless you don’t care about keeping the original quality and are planning to re-encode the rips, but I don’t imagine that’s the case since you bought Blu-ray in the first place and are going to get rid of the discs, so you won’t have the originals... hard drives fill up faster than you think!

Personally, I use the rips for watching, and keep the Blu-rays as the backup. If a hard drive crashes, you’ll lose a lot if you don’t have the original media anymore.

Good luck!

[Douglasfirs]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I reached out to Billy from the forums regarding his drives and he actually recommended that I purchase the Buffalo (Buffalo BRXL-PT6U2VB) drive since I'm not looking to get into 4K at the moment. Shout out to him!

Its was fairly simple. Did some DVDs on it so far and did Blue Velvet BD. No problems. Didn't have to download any software or firmware for the drive. So im happy!

My question is read speed. Should I bet getting x6 on DVDs? Is there anyway to improve drive speeds? Does that Libremode help with speeds or is that merely for protections on 4k?

I'm not a cinema junkie like I used to be. I don't need a 1:1 copy of the bluray honestly. As long as I can make a decent rip of the BD and not see insane artifacts/pixelation in the dark environments I'm happy. And as long as each file isn't huge. I'm hoping to find a setting that will put me at 1.5 to 2gb per BD rip. Got to experiment.

I'll keep the gems for backup. All the Hitchcock, Kubric, Lynch, etc. Do I really need to hang on to 30 Days of Night? Nah. I just want to sell off 95%. If I ever need to get it again, I'll borrow it and rip it again somehow.