rip blu-ray?

[blumovie2]

I have some blu-ray movies, but i wanna put them to my ipod, so i can enjoy them when im on bus or somewhere else. Anyone help?

[chasm]

You have several obstacles to face.

First off, you'd need a Blu-Ray external drive. Not cheap. Second, you'd need some software to "rip" the movie from the disc. None that I'm aware of on the Mac.

Finally, you'd need software that can convert the digital converted file to MP4 or H.264, the format the iPod uses. This I think we have, but I haven't had occasion to do this myself so I can't say. I might download a test file from the net to see if I can convert it. I'll let you know.

[chasm]

Follow-up: I downloaded a sample 720p file (a legal one, I should note) and tried converting it to "standard def" so that it could be burned on DVD or, as you requested, turn it into an MP4 suitable for iPods/iPhones/AppleTV.

Handbrake (free) did the trick easily, converting a 1280x720 .mkv file into 720x480 .mp4 file in roughly real-time on my BlackBook (2.16GHz Core2Duo), all I had to do was specify the output resolution. I could have hit the iPod/iPhone preset and just let it do the work. Easy.

Handbrake can do these conversion jobs while you're sleeping, so I suggest just loading in a few before you go to bed, and let Handbrake chew on em overnight, then do a sync with your iPod in the morning. Done.

[Turboladdade]

You can do conversion from HD (or any other resolution) to iPhone/iPod playable format with QuickTime Player. It's easy and has all the Apple settings set up:

The problem is "ripping" a Blu-Ray movie. I don't think Handbrake does that.

[chasm]

Well yes, QTX in Snow Leopard and QT Pro ($30) in Leopard/Tiger should be able to do this, but I'm not sure they can handle the DivX/XviD AVIs or MKV file formats most HD samples are encoded in.

If the digital file is in something QT supports, though, or (perhaps) if Perian and Flip4Mac WMV Player are installed, it's possible you won't need Handbrake/VLC.

The big problem really is "ripping" BluRay discs in the first place. Admittedly I don't do this sort of thing so I'm not the authority, but I'm unaware of any software for Macs that can rip BR movies even if one has a BR optical drive. As far as I know, you need Windows to do that part -- at least at present.

[balram003]

If you have an external Blu-ray drive, then you can try Pavtube Blu-ray ripper for Mac. It has the output format for iPod, please see the picture attached below:

[chasm]

Thanks for that info, here's another product that's just been updated:

http://www.my-video-converter.com/blu_ray_ripper_mac/

See, this is why I love forums. It forces me to learn new stuff!

[Turboladdade]

There seem to be like 40 different companies peddling video conversion software. You guys can't see it, but we get lots of spam (always from China) advertising video conversion software, and it comes from different companies every week it seems.

I'm not sure what the deal is there but something about it seems like shady business going on. Does anyone have any real-world experience with these programs?