Things you should know before ripping a Blu-ray to HD media player

When people rip Blu-ray for HD media player playback, they want the best quality, if possible, everything original. However, this is not a good idea. Not any HD media player can replace a Blu-ray Disc player so far. Even there are HD media player boxes that lets users to add a Blu-ray Disc drive (e.g. Popcorn Hour C-200), they do not give you full features. Normally you have main movie but lose the menus and special features, and this is called simple BD-navigation.

But most HD media players only read Medias from HDD. That’s why people need get Blu-rays ripped first. When ripping a Blu-ray to HDD, there are quite a lot of formats to save the movie to : ISO, BDMV, M2TS, MKV, and whatever video format you like. Many guys choose ISO because it keeps everything original of the Blu-ray movie. Well “everything original” includes the menus and features and some other files that your HD media player can not play. Without them you can save 3GB or more for a single Blu-ray movie.

And “everything original” also means the 1080p video of very high bitrate, up to 7.1-channels HD audio and PGS subtitles. Now the question is, can your HD media player decode TrueHD and DTS-HD codec? If not, can it pass-through them to an audio receiver that supports these codecs? If not again, you’ll have to down-mix them during Blu-ray ripping, say converting DTS-HD to Dolby Digital 5.1 audio or AAC stereo, otherwise you’ll watch a silent film…

If audio codec is not a problem for you, and you don’t care much about subtitles (captions), MakeMKV is your choice- it rips Blu-ray to MKV with main movie, original audio tracks and subtitles. And 30 days’ free trial. You wanna have subtitles displayed on HDTV when playing ripped Blu-ray? Choose ByteCopy then. It converts the PGS subtitles to DVD subtitle format, which is definitely acceptable by HD media players. It also lets you extract .srt subtitles for MKV file, including forced subtitles.

There is not a “best way for ripping Blu-ray”, as it depends on what media player and audio system you have. My advice is, check the specs of your devices before you backup a Blu-ray Disc to hard drive.

Read more:

How to watch DVD movies on TV/Laptop/Smartphone via Plex Media Server?
Playing Blu-ray with Popcorn Hour A-200 (BDMV/MKV/M2TS playback solutions)
How to stream Blu-ray movies to Popcorn Hour A-400 – Saving Blu-ray movies to NAS