Don't have Amazon Prime? Students can get a free 6-Month Amazon Prime trial with free 2-day shipping, unlimited video streaming & more.
If you're not a student, there's also a free 1-Month Amazon Prime trial available.
You can also earn cash back rewards on Amazon and Whole Foods purchases with the Amazon Prime Visa credit card. Read our review to see if it’s the right card for you.
Big Thank You to whomever is doing the MA breakdown.. It saves a ton of time. I really appreciate it
Thanks. Better than being locked to a single service, still not as good as actually owning them. Sad that the only way to have a digital copy of a movie in your possession that can be used on typical devices (smart TV, tablet, phone, PC) is piracy. If you can do it, I guess there is also the route of ripping owned blu-rays. I really wish there was service that'd just let me download unencrypted copies of the content I've purchased. I really don't understand why they don't do it -- all of the encryption hasn't stopped the pirates anyway. Unencrypted copies of basically everything exist. So why not let people who actually want to pay for content purchase them legally?
I was excited for a second till I saw it was digital. I only do physical media, digital only is asking for some company to change the terms and conditions on the fly and delete your library. No thanks, keep it.
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
The only way to know you'll have access to playing a title indefinitely it to purchase the physical disk. You can get a UHD-friendly drive that can rip the Blu-Ray to a digital format, removing the encryption keys. Once it's stored digitally on a storage device, assuming you follow standard data preservation practices like 3-2-1, it doesn't matter if the disk gets scratched up. You will never lose access to the digital rip and will be able to play it indefinitely.
I understand you don't want to store physical media, but it's not really that much to store if you have a solid system. After ripping the brand new, unscratched disc to my PC, I promptly discard the Blu-Ray plastic case and place the disk in a CD binder. I don't even bother alphabetizing the discs. I never intend to even look at the disc again, although I retain the discs for legal reasons and "just in case".
I have over 400 discs stored in the size of a briefcase.
I am interested in legally building up my digital library. Which products/software do you recommend for this purpose?
I am interested in legally building up my digital library. Which products/software do you recommend for this purpose?
All you really need for basic ripping and playback, software wise, is MakeMKV (this program is used to copy the movie/episode files off a disc to an MKV file) and VLC Media Player (this can play MKV files natively on Windows and Mac. The MKV container is just a direct copy of the data from a disc (if we're talking a Blu-Ray UHD disc, that could be up to 70GB file size), so some prefer to take the MKV files and convert them to a compressed video format using handbrake. Personally I just play the files in my home theater setup using a Windows PC so I don't bother converting. I prefer to keep the MKV file which is a direct copy of what data the disc has on it. Since I'm not hurting for storage space MKV works fine for me.
You can play the MKV file you created using VLC media player (assuming you have hardware that can play the content… most modern PCs can handle 4K 10bit playback but some older PCs might struggle). I actually have my media files saved on my main computer (which functions as a media server) and have a few tiny PCs in the house that connect to the main server using Ethernet connections, and stream the media from the storage in the server PC. Local playback from an internal storage device works too.
You likely will need to invest in a specific type of blu-ray drive that is considered "UHD friendly". Basically many optical drive manufacturers have locked down their drives to make them not able to copy certain Blu-ray Discs, at the behest of the movie studios that love to put copy protection features into their discs supposedly in the name of stopping piracy (even though these practices mainly just stop their customers from making legitimate copies of their media and doesn't do anything to actually stop piracy).
The solution is to find the correct type of drive and depending on what drive you have you may need to flash a specific firmware to it in order to make it be a little less uptight about making copies of discs… then it can function to make these copies and is considered a "UHD friendly" drive.
Personally I got a UHD friendly internal blu-ray drive in my server PC that I use to rip Blu-ray Discs. They do make external options if you wanted to rip discs using a laptop or another computer without hard drive bays.
MakeMKV forums has a couple of topics on UHD friendly drives that can help you decide which drive to buy to make rips with.
33 Comments
Your comment cannot be blank.
Featured Comments
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
I meant that a lot of these titles have been featured as part of Amazon Prime's line-up that is included with membership. Watching is free then.
I came to post this. Thank you.
I understand you don't want to store physical media, but it's not really that much to store if you have a solid system. After ripping the brand new, unscratched disc to my PC, I promptly discard the Blu-Ray plastic case and place the disk in a CD binder. I don't even bother alphabetizing the discs. I never intend to even look at the disc again, although I retain the discs for legal reasons and "just in case".
I have over 400 discs stored in the size of a briefcase.
I am interested in legally building up my digital library. Which products/software do you recommend for this purpose?
You can play the MKV file you created using VLC media player (assuming you have hardware that can play the content… most modern PCs can handle 4K 10bit playback but some older PCs might struggle). I actually have my media files saved on my main computer (which functions as a media server) and have a few tiny PCs in the house that connect to the main server using Ethernet connections, and stream the media from the storage in the server PC. Local playback from an internal storage device works too.
You likely will need to invest in a specific type of blu-ray drive that is considered "UHD friendly". Basically many optical drive manufacturers have locked down their drives to make them not able to copy certain Blu-ray Discs, at the behest of the movie studios that love to put copy protection features into their discs supposedly in the name of stopping piracy (even though these practices mainly just stop their customers from making legitimate copies of their media and doesn't do anything to actually stop piracy).
The solution is to find the correct type of drive and depending on what drive you have you may need to flash a specific firmware to it in order to make it be a little less uptight about making copies of discs… then it can function to make these copies and is considered a "UHD friendly" drive.
Personally I got a UHD friendly internal blu-ray drive in my server PC that I use to rip Blu-ray Discs. They do make external options if you wanted to rip discs using a laptop or another computer without hard drive bays.
MakeMKV forums has a couple of topics on UHD friendly drives that can help you decide which drive to buy to make rips with.