



Handbrake: MakeMKV will rip your Blu-Ray movie exactly as it is on the disc, which can be over 20 or 30GB in size.Right now, you shouldn’t have to pay for this program. MakeMKV claims that it’s only a beta product, but it’s been in “beta” for years, so it may stay free for a long time. This effectively extends the trial period indefinitely. Every month, you can either download the latest version of the beta or activate the application using the latest beta key in the forums. MakeMKV offers a free beta that works for 30 days, but that’s a little misleading. MakeMKV: This application, available for both Windows and macOS, rips your Blu-Rays to an MKV file. That’s it.If you want to burn your own Blu-Ray discs, you’ll need a drive that can read and write to blank Blu-Rays, but we’ll assume you just want to store them on your hard drive. Fortunately, you can get them online for less than $60. However, you’ll need a Blu-Ray reader in order to rip your Blu-Ray discs (obviously).

If your computer came with any disc drive at all, it was probably a DVD drive. Before you begin, make sure you have installed the following: But if you also picked up one of today's best NAS drives to build a media server with, the HandBrake step is crucial.You’ll need a few tools in order to start ripping your Blu-Ray collection. If you have a ton of storage and you're only using the files on your local machine it might not matter. You can, of course, skip HandBrake, but each file from a Blu-ray will be huge. MakeMKV does have a paid element, though admittedly you're never really required to pay, but if you like it then you should certainly throw the developer some cash.Įssentially you use MakeMKV to pull the data from the Blu-ray, then run it through HandBrake to compress it down. Both are completely free to use, and though MakeMKV is technically still a beta, they're both very powerful. MakeMKV (opens in new tab) and HandBrake have been featured before in our roundup of the best DVD cloning software, and for good reason. But there is a free way to do it using two pieces of incredible software. This isn't for the light-hearted, mostly because it takes such a long time to do, and it's easy to make a mistake.
