Newbie with lots of questions...

[macnmore]

I recently purchased a 3D capable projector and I'd like to rip all my Blu Rays so I can stream them through Plex to my projector. First thing I discovered is my pc does not have a Blu Ray player...so I can't rip any Blu Rays. I've read some old forums about external Blu Ray players, but being older posts I'm sure things have changed. Can you guys recommend a good/fast external Blu Ray player/ripper? It'd be nice if I could rip the 3D Blu Rays...does that take a different Blu Ray player? I've watched a lot of videos on ripping Blu Rays, and in several of them, MakeMKV can't get past the encryption so they ended up using another software program. I then read that you can download some files/codecs to allow MakeMKV to get past the encryption. Is that accurate? It seems most people rip the Blu Rays then use Handbrake to compress it. Is that still what I should look at doing? Like I said, tons of questions and I'm just looking for some guidance. If you know any articles or videos that cover this, please share.

[Woodstock]

External BD players are subject to power issues, depending on your machine and the player. MakeMKV can make them spin at top speed, so you have to make sure they are getting full power - safest bet is units that have an external power plug and supply. MakeMKV can work with most BD drives out there.

Can't help much with 3D - player has to be compatible with 3D video in an MKV file - most are not, so they only play a 2D stream.

Many people claim damaged or defective disks are "encrypted" in ways MakeMKV cannot handle. Sometimes, that is correct, but Mike usually fixes that, and there are a LOT of work-arounds in MakeMKV to deal with deliberate corruption inserted into disks to make them "uncopyable".

And there are a lot of disks that put dozens or hundreds of fake titles on a disk to make it harder to tell which one is correct. But those aren't MakeMKV issues.... it will faithfully pull every one of them off the disk and save them.

But the majority of reports I've seen here of "super new copy protection" have simply been bad disks. The logs will show that they drive couldn't find anything to read, or couldn't read it correctly. And there are packages out there that will just ignore those errors, same as a stand-alone player is programmed to do, but the result is not correct, and will cause problems later.

"Most people" who post in forums aren't "most people", so, while even I advocate using handbrake to compress the files after they're extracted, I would never go so far as to say most people who use MakeMKV also use Handbrake.

The easiest way to answer your questions, though, is to treat this all as an adventure game. You have a goal - make the video accessible to your entertainment system. You have base materials (the disks) and access to tools (programs). The rules are simple - if it isn't "right", you try again. And you get to define what "right" is. Begin playing!