How to Rip Blu-Ray discs with MakeMKV and handbrake

[GamesBXdaily]

What you need: You will need a few tools to start extracting your Blu-Ray collection. Before you begin, make sure you have the following installed:
  Blu-Ray drive. If your computer comes with any drive, it could be a DVD drive. However, you will need a Blu-Ray reader to extract your Blu-Ray discs (obviously). Luckily, you can get them online for under $ 60. If you want to burn your own Blu-Ray discs, you'll need a readable drive and write to blank Blu-Rays, but we'll assume you just want to store them on your hard drive.
 MakeMKV: This application, available for both Windows and macOS, extracts your Blu-Rays into MKV files. That's it. MakeMKV offers a free 30-day beta, but that's a bit misleading. Every month, you can download the latest beta version or activate the application using the latest beta lock in the forums. This effectively extends the trial period indefinitely. MakeMKV claims that it's just a beta product, but it has been in beta beta for years, so it can be free for a long time. Right now, you don't need to pay for this program.
 Handbrake: MakeMKV will extract your Blu-Ray movie exactly as it appears on the disc, which can be over 20 or 30 GB in size. So we will use Handbrake to compress your MKV files into something a little more manageable without losing quality. This is not really necessary, but it is a waste of resources to store, play, and stream large video files if you do not need them.
This is all you need. Once you've installed all three, grab your favorite Blu-Ray movies and get started.
Step one: Rip your Blu-Ray with MakeMKV
First, you will need to perform a basic Blu-Ray rip. MakeMKV is a simple application that did one really good thing: create a full-size, 1080p MKV video file from your Blu-Ray disc. Once you have the MKV, you can minimize it, convert it or modify it the way you want. You can even view it as it is now, if you like, but it's probably better if you zoom it down a bit later.
To extract your movie, put the disc in your Blu-Ray drive and open MakeMKV. After a few moments, a large Blu-Ray drive icon will appear. Click here to scan the titles on your disk.
When MakeMKV finishes scanning the headlines, you will see a list of them in the left panel of the application. You can choose the titles you want to rip here. This list will include special features, deleted scenes and anything else on the disk. You might guess a bit to find out what music, but if you just want to watch a movie, then it is probably a really big song that takes about 20-30GB on disk. Select only the tracks you want to extract.
Next, on the right side of the window, select the folder where you want to place the MKV file. This should be on a hard drive with plenty of free space. You can see an estimate of the size of the file in the Information section, but suppose that you will need an additional 20 GB or more just in case (you will need it later to convert your file). When you are ready, click the Create MKV button with the green arrow.
MakeMKV will take a while to extract your movie (usually about 20 to 30 minutes). A green progress bar will tell you how far the process lasts. If at any time you need to cancel rip, click the orange stop icon.
When the rip is done, you will see a popup like this. You can now remove the disc from your drive and even start a new rip if you want.
At this point, if you want to watch your movie, you can upload it using VLC, Plex, Kodi or any other video player that supports MKV and start watching. If you are not interested in saving space on your hard drive, you can stop here. However, we will adjust everything to make your library cleaner and more efficient.
Step two: Shrink your film to a reasonable size with the parking brake
If you open the folder with the newly extracted movie in it, you'll notice that it can be huge.
To fix this, launch Handbrake and select File to open a video. You can also choose Folders (Batch Scan) to scan multiple video files at once, if you have many extracts you want to convert. This step will only scan the details of the files before you convert them, so you can choose a folder containing all your extracts at once, then decide how to convert them later.
When Handbrake finishes scanning your files, you will see a window like the one below. If you have scanned several movies at once, you can select which ones you want to convert by clicking the Title drop-down in the Source section.
Once you've selected your title, click Browse in the Destination section to choose where you want to place your converted files.
Next is the more difficult part: choose your quality setting.
The easiest way to do this is to choose a preset from the right side of the application window. Which one you choose will depend on how many original videos you want to save. For example, you might want to see every glorious detail of a robot fighting in the Pacific Rim because the film was designed with high-resolution special effects in mind. On the other hand, you probably won't miss much if you compress a copy of What We Do in the Dark, because this is a relatively low-budget stand-alone comedy without many effects. Besides, these jokes are funny regardless of resolution.
With that in mind, you have a few options to downsize your movie:
Use high-quality, high-resolution presets: All Blu-Rays come in 1080p, but the rip you create with MakeMKV remains uncompressed from the disc version. Choose a preset like Super HQ 1080p30 Dome to keep as much detail as possible while still shrinking the file size. This is the best option to use for heavy visual or intense effect movies. (However, please note that if you want higher quality audio, you may want to go to the Audio Audio tab and change the AAC drop-down menu or AC3.)
Use high quality, lower resolution presets: High-resolution video technology including 1080p and 720p. Stepping down to 720p might sound like a huge drop in quality, but in most cases, it's not. In fact, a high quality 720p file with minimal compression will often look better than a lower quality 1080p rip with lots of compression. If you want to reduce your file size further without reducing too much video quality, use the presets such as Super HQ 720p30 Dome or HQ 720p30 Surround. This is ideal for films where the image does not matter, or the films are not beautiful compared to modern films. Comedies, low-budget action movies or just movies that you don't care much about can fit into this category.
Use low quality, lower resolution presets: Two presets will protect you in almost anything, but if you need to save space and don't care about image quality for one number of movies, you can go down to lower quality and lower resolution like before 720p30 very quickly to save a ton of space. This is perfect for the movies in your bad movie collection like Sharknado, Birdemia, or the awesome new Foursome.
It's up to you to decide whether you care more about high quality video or saving space on your hard drive. Fortunately, you can make decisions for each case.
For most people, the basic presets should make tips. But if you know what you're doing, feel free to adjust any other advanced settings in the Videos, Audio, and Subtitles tabs - if the video quality isn't good enough for you, for example, you might want to have RF is 16 instead of 18 in the Video Videos tab. You may also want to change the frame rate from 30 to Same as Source.
Finally, in the Container Container section, you can choose MP4 or MKV. MKV offers more features and may contain slightly higher quality videos, but MP4 is compatible with more devices, especially mobile devices like iPhones. Check the device you want to play the file on - if it supports MKV, go with MKV, if not, go with MP4.
When you are ready, click the green Start coding button to start converting your video. Alternatively, you can click Add to Queue and move to the next title you have scanned, then click the Start green row button when you have finished selecting presets for all your movies.
When your files are converted, they will be anywhere from a little smaller. Play them to make sure they are an acceptable quality level for you, then you can delete the originals. You are now ready to add your movie to the library and start watching.

Thanks for reading.
Source by GamesBX.tk

[Ashraf]

Is there a particular drive i can install in my mac pro 5,1 that will rip my 4k blu ray discs? I see that there are flashed drives available on the forums that will use libre mode. Are any of these compatible with mac os?

[st4evr]

Is there a particular drive i can install in my mac pro 5,1 that will rip my 4k blu ray discs? I see that there are flashed drives available on the forums that will use libre mode. Are any of these compatible with mac os?

You’re question has already been answered here:

https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic ... 888#p79888

In the appropriate forum.

[snowycarl]

I am getting really slow rip times. This does not seem normal. Using 2012 iMac 27, lots of memory OSX 10.14.6 and Seatech Bluray writer connected USB 2.0 (that is what the machine has writer is 3.0 backward compatible), My times on a typical commercial movie are:

Build Title list 3-5 min
Analyzing Seamless Segments 13-18 Min
Rip 1 tile only (Feature) 5-7 HOURS

Then Handbrake down to mp4 is pretty fast.. like 20-30 min. I have disabled antivirus... writing to Fusion drive (yes, older machine and have not upgraded to SSD)

Thoughts as to where the problem might be or is this typical?

[philbax]

Just a quick note: you don't *have* to rip with MakeMKV separately and then convert with Handbrake.

You can make two copies of the appropriate libmmbd library (libmmbd.dll on Windows with 32-bit Handbrake; libmmbd64.dll with 64-bit Handbrake) in the Handbrake install directory, and name them "libaacs.dll" and "libbdplus.dll" (or .dylib on Mac), restart Handbrake, and Handbrake will be able to scan and rip Blu-rays directly. Saves quite a bit of time!

Edit: I believe you can do the same in the VLC install directory to be able to open Blu-Rays with VLC.

[Woodstock]

However, combining the steps eliminates the true advantage; by making YOU wait for the encode to conclude before changing disks.

If you are ripping a single disk at a session, yes, there is an advantage to linking MakeMKV and handbrake directly. As soon as you add a second disk to rip, though, your time spent on the ripping process increases. MakeMKV can rip disks as fast as your drive can read, and you can queue the resulting MKV files in handbrake just as quickly. My recent experience with ripping the entire Star Trek TV franchise BD sets, which had over 170 disks, was spread out over a few days, a couple hours at a time, while handbrake worked non-stop on compressing the episodes for over a week.

That is an extreme example, but a two-disk TV series is 30-40 minutes of my time feeding disks, and half a day of handbrake churning through the results.

[philbax]

Fair point!

I typically am only ripping a few discs at a time, and I've got a pretty beefy CPU, so encoding doesn't take *too* terribly long (~10-12 min for a DVD, ~30-40 min for a Blu-ray).

Is extracting with MakeMKV fairly CPU-light? Can you run both the extraction and the encode without cannibalizing power from either? Or do you need to do all of the extracts and then batch all of the encodes?

I'll have to experiment with timing to see which makes more since in my case, though I can definitely see how it would make a big difference with that many discs!

[Woodstock]

When I'm ripping, I typically run 2 copies of MakeMKV (sometimes 3) while running handbrake, on a 4-core i5 CPU. Technically, I could put a couple more USB drives on the machine, but 2 works most of the time. Handbrake hardly notices the MakeMKV CPU usage.

MakeMKV is not CPU-intensive. I previously would run 2 copies on a 2GHz 2-core Celeron processor, without issue (no handbrake use on that one). I would actually have 3 machines in different rooms doing the ripping, until the Celeron machine got cannibalized to fix a weather computer. I have since run it on a "Wintel W8" computer, but that was limited by its 100Mbit network connection.

[philb1701]

It has been my experience that making an mkv file from a blu-ray typically takes about 45-55 minutes.
Transcoding that mkv file into an m4v file (Apple's version of mp4) with Handbrake is usually on a 2:1 or sometimes 3:1 basis. Meaning if the movie runs approximately 2 hours (which most do), figure 4-6 hours for Handbrake to do its thing. I usually let Handbrake run at night on my MacBook Pro, when I don't care so much how long it takes.

Wake up in the morning, boom, your iTunes compatible movie is ready for viewing. Kind of like going to the restroom when you are at a restaurant, and when you come back, your food is waiting for you. Very satisfying!

[swsmith1971]

Just a quick note: you don't *have* to rip with MakeMKV separately and then convert with Handbrake.

You can make two copies of the appropriate libmmbd library (libmmbd.dll on Windows with 32-bit Handbrake; libmmbd64.dll with 64-bit Handbrake) in the Handbrake install directory, and name them "libaacs.dll" and "libbdplus.dll" (or .dylib on Mac), restart Handbrake, and Handbrake will be able to scan and rip Blu-rays directly. Saves quite a bit of time!

Edit: I believe you can do the same in the VLC install directory to be able to open Blu-Rays with VLC.

Can someone please explain how to do this in layman's terms running an iMac (Retina 5K, 27",2019) with Catalina. I have both the makemkv software and Handbrake.

[Woodstock]

From what I'm reading, you're not going to make it work on Catalina unless you use an older version of handbrake. The latest versions of handbrake comply with Apple's "sandboxing" requirements, and Catalina enforces them, so the two processes can't talk to each other.

[swsmith1971]

From what I'm reading, you're not going to make it work on Catalina unless you use an older version of handbrake. The latest versions of handbrake comply with Apple's "sandboxing" requirements, and Catalina enforces them, so the two processes can't talk to each other.

I'm actually using Handbrake Version 1.2.0 (2018122200), I'm shy of the version (HandBrake 1.3.0) where HandBrake is now sandboxed and uses the macOS hardened runtime.

[swsmith1971]

I'm also using the latest version (MakeMKV v1.15.1 darwin(x64-release) of MakeMKV.

[mike admin]

From what I'm reading, you're not going to make it work on Catalina unless you use an older version of handbrake. The latest versions of handbrake comply with Apple's "sandboxing" requirements, and Catalina enforces them, so the two processes can't talk to each other.

The libmmbd (from unsigned, unsandboxed, unhardened and otherwise dangerous MakeMKV) still can be used by sandboxed/hardened applications, if it is copied to a proper location. VLC is an example how it works. So, at least in theory, this should work.

[megaspaz]

The libmmbd (from unsigned, unsandboxed, unhardened and otherwise dangerous MakeMKV) still can be used by sandboxed/hardened applications, if it is copied to a proper location. VLC is an example how it works. So, at least in theory, this should work.

AFAIK, placing the aliases in /usr/local/lib, the libmmbd does work, provided you fix the original file name you alias from - libmmbd_new.dylib or libmmbd_old.dylib are the new names in makemkv. The only problem is that any 1.3 version of handbrake now crashes whenever you open a bluray directly in handbrake now. I didn't test hb and previous versions of makemkv (< 1.15.1) though... Everything I've seen from the hb forums, they don't much care that this workflow is broken, ie. using libmmbd in ~/lib...

@swsmith1971 - if you want to rip blurays directly in handbrake, just keep a copy of handbrake 1.2.2 in Applications calling it like "Handbrake 1.2.2" for use when ripping blurays and hb 1.3+ for everything else... if you plan on using makemkv first before using handbrake, then you can just dump hb 1.2.2