And third, Handbrake takes forever to rip a Blu-Ray: “Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith” took over two hours from start to finish. Second, there are few profiles dedicated to HD formats built-into Handbrake, so while you can easily go full-sized (1080p) there’s no 720p preset. You can actually rip Blu-Ray videos directly into H.264 format using the Handbrake utility I recommended in How to Rip DVD Videos, but this has a few drawbacks.įirst, for the movies I’ve tested, I haven’t seen a way to get soft captions working you have to either “burn in” captions or ignore them. And as with DVD video, I focus my attention on converting the handful of Blu-Ray movies I do have to some more easily-accessed digital format.īecause Blu-Ray videos are HD quality and because the resulting files can be humongous, you’re going to need to spend some time testing output so you can find a good balance between quality and size.

So while the “Indiana Jones,” “James Bond,” and “Lord of the Rings” movies are all available in high-quality HD formats via iTunes and other services, the “Star Wars” movies are not. For 1080p HD Blu-Ray movies, that means blockbusters. But the results can of course be spectacular.Īs I noted in How to Rip DVD Videos, I don’t really buy a lot of disc-based content, and these days most of what I do buy simply isn’t available in some digital content. And worse, it takes a very long time to rip Blu-Ray content, especially full-length movies.

For starters, there’s no free solution that I’m aware of. Ripping Blu-Ray videos is not as straightforward as doing so with DVD videos.

Libdvdcss handbrake