Now Handbrake can directly rip a Blu-Ray disk

Jan 14, 2015 12:11 GMT  ·  By

After Steve Jobs declared that Blu-Ray was a "bag of hurt," Apple never officially supported this format, that's why it's pretty hard now to find related software.

It took a lot of time to find the necessary tools that could help us rip a Blu-Ray and make a personal (backup) copy of the disk, but now we have an easy solution on our hands.

It involves the use of HandBrake and MakeMKV, and there no need to rip to MKV container as a first step; Handbrake can rip the disk directly.

Handbrake is a standard for DVD ripping, but it does not have the necessary tools to directly rip a Blu-Ray disk, that's why we need MakeMKV.

1. Download Handbrake and copy Handbrake.app to your Applications folder. If you choose the Nightly build, you will also have H265 video codec support.

2. Download MakeMKV and copy MakeMKV.app to your Applications folder. 2.1 Install daspi_1.5pkg, from the dmg file.

3. Open Terminal  and copy the following lines one by one:

code
cd ~

mkdir -p ~/lib

ln -s /Applications/MakeMKV.app/Contents/lib/libmmbd.dylib ~/lib/libaacs.dylib

ln -s /Applications/MakeMKV.app/Contents/lib/libmmbd.dylib ~/lib/libbdplus.dylib
This will install the tool needed to make Handbrake work with Blu-Ray.

4. Open Handbrake and select your Blu-Ray disk. You can choose a predefined profile or you can go for the custom settings.

H264 is the industry standard now, but the future is H265. The problem is that few devices can play H265 encoded files, and even fewer have hardware decoding capabilities. It took us approximately 6 hours to rip and encode a 2-hour-long DVD using H265 codec and an Intel i7 processor.

It's good to know that iPhone 6 has H265 hardware support, but for the moment it can be only used by Facetime. In the future, this could be unlocked with hardware decoding support (implying way less battery drain), so that you can watch H265 movies.