Instructions on how to Rip Blu-ray discs for your PC

Streaming is convenient, but Blu-ray offers the best quality video and audio you can get in a home theater.

If you want to store those high-quality Blu-ray movies on your PC and play them through something like Kodi (or if you want to back them up in case of future scratches), you can “extract” them to your computer using a simple, free program called MakeMKV. Here’s how to do it.

What you need

To rip those movies for your PC, you’ll need a few things:

Blu-ray drive:

You’ll need an optical drive in your PC that can read Blu-ray discs. The DVD drive is not enough. You can buy an external one that connects via USB or an internal one for your desktop; that’s fine.

However, if you want to rip 4K UHD Blu-ray, your options are more limited. Due to enhanced copy protection, 4K UHD Blu-ray discs cannot be ripped on most 4K Blu-ray drives. You’ll want an old, conventional, “4K-friendly” Blu-ray drive instead. You can find a list of popular 4K-friendly drives here, but keep in mind that new firmware can break this functionality, so you’ll want to avoid updating your drives, and in some cases case, it may even be necessary to restore the firmware it shipped.

MakeMKV :

MakeMKV is a Windows, macOS, and Linux program that can rip DVD and Blu-ray discs into the versatile MKV video format. Other paid programs offer more features, like DeUHD and AnyDVD, but we’ll use MakeMKV for this tutorial since it’s free. (Technically, it’s only free in beta, but it’s been “in beta” for about ten years. It would help if you used the latest beta key whenever it asks you to sign up, about one once a month. You can purchase a $50 license if you want to avoid this annoyance.)

Handbrake (Optional):

Another free program for Windows, macOS, and Linux, Handbrake, can take a video file and compress it to a smaller file size. That comes with a loss in video quality, so you can choose to skip this step altogether, but Handbrake has a ton of settings that you can use to find the perfect balance between quality and save space if you are limited in disk space.

That’s it! Once you have the right hardware and software lined up, you’re ready to rip some movies.

Step 1: Set up MakeMKV

Install MakeMKV like any other program and launch it. It will prompt you to register, and you can enter your key now (or enter it later in the menu Help > Registration).

If you’re ripping traditional Blu-ray discs, that’s all you need to do. However, if you have a 4K-friendly drive and want to rip a 4K UHD disc, you’ll need to take another step. MakeMKV cannot circumvent copy protection on its own, so you need a hashed decryption key for the disk in question. You can download a list of currently known hash keys, which you can find through a quick Google search.

Keep in mind that not every movie is currently available. If you cannot find the movie you want to rip or have a hash key for a different version of the disc (for example, from another country), then MaxMakeMKV will not extract it. Once you find the keys you need, copy them and create a text file on your computer for easy access.

Go to MakeMKV’s preferences, go to the General tab, and select the “data” folder for MakeMKV (or note the path of the default folder). Copy the text file of the hashed keys to that folder and restart MakeMKV. It will then be able to reference those keys when ripping a 4K UHD Blu-ray. You may need to periodically update this text file as new movies are released on 4K Blu-ray.

Step 2: Insert and rip your disc

When MakeMKV launches, it scans your computer for an optical drive, then gives you information about your drive and the name of the disc inside it. (If you get an error, you may need to right-click on the shortcut and run it as administrator.) If everything is fine, click the big Blu-ray button to open the disc for ripping.

After scanning the disc, MakeMKV will show you a list of “titles” on the disc. At least one of these will be the full movie, while other titles may be special features or other footage. Click on the different titles and search for one that matches the length and chapter number of the movie itself, then uncheck the other boxes. You can also expand a certain title to add or remove track audio and subtitles, although the default choices should be fine here for most users.

In the right pane, click the folder icon to select where you want the resulting video to appear and click the “Create MKV” button.

The movie may take a while to rip, depending on the size of the movie and your player speed. Be prepared to do something else for an hour while you wait. However, when the process is complete, you will have an MKV file that you can open in a video player like VLC.

Also, keep in mind that MakeMKV is not guaranteed to rip every disc. Some discs may have newer copy protection programs that haven’t been jailbroken, or your disc may be damaged too much. (Copying discs can be harder than playing them, so even if the disc plays fine in your Xbox One, there’s no guarantee it will reliably tear). If you get an error, try cleaning the disc or try removing some of the scratches. If that doesn’t work, you may need a new disc or a newer version of MakeMKV.

Step 3: Compress your video (Optional)

A typical Blu-ray movie is typically between 15GB and 30GB in size, with a 4K UHD Blu-ray being even larger, around 50GB or more. That’s a lot of space, and it’s easy to fill up your hard drive after ripping just a fraction of your collection.

After all, you can always buy some large drives to store your movies, storage is pretty affordable these days, or you can compress those movies down to a more manageable size. You’ll lose some video quality, so this might not be ideal for those 4K HDR Blu-rays, but it could be a worthwhile endeavor for comedies, and visually impressive movies are different.

To compress your movie, open Handbrake. In the Choose Source menu that appears, click File and browse to the location of your newly extracted MKV file. The Handbrake will open it and prepare to switch. Click the Browse button at the bottom of the window to select a destination for your final video file and choose your quality settings.

That can get complicated, but you can save yourself some time by clicking the “Preset” button on the toolbar and choosing an option from the sidebar that appears. Obviously, “Super HQ 1080p30 Surround” will give you higher quality results than “Fast 720p30”, so choose what looks good to you for that movie. (There are also presets for specific devices, like Roku or Apple TV.)

Regardless of which preset you choose, I recommend going to the “Video” tab and changing the Big Frame to “Same as Source.” If you’re watching this movie in your home theater with high-quality sound, you might also want to go to the “Audio” tab and drag the “Passthru” option to the top of the list. From there, you’re free to tweak whatever you want. Select a video format on the Summary tab (MKV has more features, but MP4 is more compatible with some older devices) and click “Start Encoding.”

Again, this will take a while to complete, but when it’s done, you’ll have a much smaller video file that you can safely store on your computer, take on board with a USB drive, or watch at a friend’s house.