By Jason Snell

January 6, 2015 10:42 AM PT

Last updated February 27, 2024

How I rip DVDs and Blu-rays

I’ve got a couple of large plastic bins in my office that are full of DVDs and Blu-rays. Many of these are TV shows and movies that now stream in HD on one of the streaming services I subscribe to, making me question my purchase decisions, but intellectual property appears and disappears from streaming services so often that I like to have my own streaming service of sorts, one full of movies and shows that I can watch on my large home TV or load onto my iPad for a flight without worrying.

When I mention converting DVDs and Blu-rays, people ask me about the method I use. For some people, getting video off of a disc and playable in iTunes or on an iOS device is old news. For other people, though, it’s still a bit of a mystery. Back in the Macworld days, one of our most popular stories was about how to convert DVDs into files, so clearly there’s interest in this subject.

I’ll detail my methods below, but as at Macworld I want to start with a disclaimer: I don’t use these tools for piracy, and neither should you. I use these tools on discs that I own, in order to create files that I keep within my household. Is it legal? Your mileage may vary. Distributing files that subvert copy protection is arguably illegal in the United States; using that software is more arguably legal. I don’t have any qualms about place-shifting my personal viewing of content I’ve purchased and still own. Still, if the idea of any of this makes you uncomfortable, look away.

What you’ll need

An external optical drive. I upgraded my disc-ripping hardware with a $200 4K UHD-compatible drive flashed with LibreDrive firmware, which means it’ll read data from discs of any region and any format. Rather than flash the firmware in Windows myself, I just bought a pre-flashed drive from Alex Coluzzi, one of the drive resellers on the previously linked Reddit thread. It works great, and Alex was great to work with.

MakeMKV. This is the essential disk-extracting software for Mac. It costs $50, and I trust the developer, who has been updating it diligently for years. It’s got a free 30-day trial, so you can see if it works for you. MakeMKV lets you extract DVDs and Blu-ray discs into MKV files, playable using many different playback apps, including my favorite, IINA. (If you don’t want to pay $50 and only want to rip DVDs, I recommend using Handbrake — see below — and installing decss via Homebrew, as described in the previous version of this article, located below this version.)

Transcoding scripts. I use Plex as my home media server, and it’ll accept MKV files and transcode them into any format your playback devices need. But the files that come straight off an optical disc are generally a lot larger than they need to be, and storage space is at a premium if you’re hoarding movies and TV shows. So I transcode those files and convert them to MP4 format with Lisa Melton’s video transcoding and other video transcoding scripts. You need to have a little bit of familiarity with the Terminal app to install these scripts, but once you get the hang of it they’re pretty easy.

Lisa has spent dozens (if not hundreds) of hours tweaking her scripts to choose the right settings for video encodes. Files tend to be a bit larger than some other methods you could use, but that’s because Lisa is trying to balance file size with quality.

HandBrake. If the Terminal is too much for you, then use the old standby — HandBrake. It will also convert those files out of MakeMKV. (I used to use HandBrake to directly convert files off of DVDs, but the software to do that has become untenable in recent versions of MacOS, so I now only use HandBrake as a transcoder, not as a disc-extractor.) HandBrake is free and it works. It’s worth having around.

Once my files are done, I transfer them to a very large hard drive (in my case, it’s a RAID attached to my Mac mini server) and Plex catalogs them and adds them to my Plex library. I use the Plex app for Apple TV to stream them to my TV, and the Plex app on my iPad to watch them—or load them up for travel.

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