14 DAY TRIAL // Watching your Blu-Ray movies on mobile devices can be a hassle, but it's not impossible. MakeMKV and HandBrake are two fairly easy to use utilities that can help you rip Blu-ray disks and convert the videos to iOS or Android-compatible video formats.
Whenever high-definition videos are concerned, Blu-ray disks seem to be the popular medium of choice for disseminating the data. However, the fact that you get to store more information on a disk does not cancel the same old problem: how can you back up the content in a less prone to destruction format?
As of late, this issue is usually accompanied by the desire to access the contained media on all your devices, regardless of whether they can be connected to a Blu-ray player or whether they come with support for the original format or not.
Noteworthy is that most commercially distributed disks include some type of copy protection system. Since the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act opposes the presumption of a “fair use” granted by most copyright laws, the final result is a legal gray area.
The bottom line is that, if you want to copy the Blu-ray disk content to your Mac, you need to use an application that is able to bypass the protection system.
Tools such as HandBrake (an open source project) are perfectly capable to read both DVDs and Blu-rays, besides converting videos to various formats, but they are not yet able to rip Blu-ray discs that are encrypted (commercial) . Keep in mind that the DASPI component must also be installed on your Mac to be able to read unencrypted Blu-rays. DASPI installer is included in the dmg package.
On the other hand, MakeMKV, which is a commercial product, can handle the task flawlessly (it comes with a 30-day trial if you want to test it with your own Blu-ray discs).
Of course, there are many other software solutions out there that can help you rip and convert Blu-ray data. Nonetheless, the MakeMKV and HandBrake combination is very popular, probably because MakeMKV seems to be able to rip most disks, while HandBrake generates videos optimized for specific devices with minimal user interaction.
In short, the whole procedure is reduced to three simple steps:
1. connect your external Blu-ray player to your Mac and insert the disk you want to back up
2. launch the MakeMKV application to read the disk and export its content to an MKV file (this format allows you to store an unlimited number of video tracks, together with their metadata)
3. import the MKV file in the HandBrake application and convert it to M4V or MP4, while adjusting the video and audio quality
Of course, the external Blu-ray player device is necessary because Mac computers do not include them by default: any player that can be connected via USB should work just fine. During the Blu-ray ripping stage of our test, we have used the SE-506 Portable BD Writer from Samsung with an 2GHz Intel Core Duo iMac sporting 6GB RAM.
Once launched, MakeMKV automatically detects all the optical drive devices connected to your Mac and then scans the contained disks in order to gather as much information as possible, including the protection system used.
It is advisable to select only the largest “Title,” which contains the actual movie, together with any of the associated soundtracks or subtitles that you plan to use, if you want to avoid long processing times and to generate MKV files that have an acceptable size.
MakeMKV was able to rip a 28GB Blu-ray disk that contained 7 different titles in about an hour, while using about 30% CPU power and 600MB RAM. The app generated 7 different MKV files, summing up to around 30GB. Considering the reasonable amount of system resources usage, you can leave MakeMKV to perform the task in the background and go about your business until the job is done.
The M4V container is usually employed by Apple when distributing video content, so this type of files can be played by QuickTime and are supported by all Apple devices, such as iPhones, iPads, iPods (nano, touch, or classic), and Apple TVs.
Handbrake enables you to convert the generated MKV files to both M4V and MP4, depending on the target devices: the application comes with various predefined profiles that have the settings adjusted for specific devices, including gadgets running on Android.
Unfortunately, working with HandBrake proves to be quite stressful for your system: it took about 5 hours to convert a 16.13 GB MKV file previously generated by MakeMKV while using the “iPhone & iPod touch” profile on our 2GHz Intel Core Duo iMac. During this time, HandBrake used about 150% of the CPU processing power and around 500 MB of RAM. The good news is that you have the option to pause the process and resume where you left off in case you are working on something important.
On the other hand, converting the file on a Dual 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro with 12GB RAM took around 40 minutes. While processing, HandBrake put a load of between 900% and 1,300% on the Mac's CPU and used between 600 and 700 MB RAM. The compressed file size was 1.97GB and the video played flawlessly on an iPhone 4S running on iOS 7.
It should be noted that, as it was the case of the 2GHz Intel Core Duo iMac, while Handbrake was converting the movie the system was perfectly usable and no applications were affected by the lowered amount of system resources.
To conclude, the MakeMKV / Handbrake combo’s efficiency when it comes to ripping and converting high-definition videos in order to make them suitable for playback on various Apple devices is ultimately reduced to your Mac’s processing power.
Granted, processing all the information stored on a Blu-ray disk might take a significant amount of time, but that translates into a safer storage space, less wasted time when you want to actually play back the video, and a lot more flexibility when it comes to the playback device.
The same rules apply if you want to perform the process using a Windows machine: both MakeMKV and Handbrake developers also provide Windows versions for the utilities.