I bought lots of Bluray Movies, most of them are Cartoons for my Kids. Most of movies were damaged by Kids and unable to play them.
I would like to copy them into a HDD and to play them on the TV. Please let me know what Software / Hardware do I need.
(a) Blu-ray Recorder (any specifications?)
(b) HDD Drive (what kind of a HDD? Should it read HD and Blu-ray)
(c) Which software to copy movies to HDD?
(d) Media Player to watch recorded movies on the TV (what kind of a player)
I know the laws, etc. but please understand what I am trying to do. I am trying to keep a copy of movies I have already bought.
A. I quite like my Pioneer Bluray burner.
B. Any USB hard drive will do. Hard drives just save and read files. They don't care what sort of files they are.
C. AnyDVD. I'm not sure if there's a free program for ripping Bluray discs. Once the video is on your hard drive you can keep it "as-is" or re-encode it to reduce the file size. MeGUI, Handbrake, RipBot264, ffcoder.... They're all popular choices for converting.
D. Not sure what you're asking. Are you referring to playing encoded Blurays or are you referring to playing stuff you recorded with the TV? Does your TV have a built in USB media player, or will you be connecting the PC to it, or will you be needing some sort of media player?
Copying the movie itself is fairly easy but the file sizes will be quite large (20GB to 30GB would be typical). There's probably 100 different ways to do it, but this is mine.....
I run AnyDVD in the background. It decrypts the disc "on the fly" so to any software accessing the disc, there's no copy protection. From there you can use any program to copy/convert the movie (usually the largest m2ts file on the disc).
I use MeGUI. There's other conversion software which has less of a learning curve (I mentioned a few in my previous post), but I prefer MeGUI.
With AnyDVD running I open MeGUI's HD Streams Extractor from the Tools menu. Using the HD Streams Extractor I open the m2ts file on the disc. I then use it to extract the appropriate audio track and it also extracts the video to an MKV file on my hard drive. If you're not going to convert it that's pretty much the end of the process.
Once the video and audio are extracted I open the MKV using MeGUI. It's all personal choice but I run quality based encoding using the same quality setting each time (I use 19, MeGUI defaults to 20. Higher values reduce the quality and the output file size). I also downsize to 720p. Many Blurays don't have 1080p worth of resolution anyway (even if they are 1080p).
Once the encoding is set up I get MeGUI to convert the video while adding the audio extracted from the disc (I don't convert it). I generally output using an MKV container but MP4 works just as well.
My PC is hooked up to my TV and it's my media player. There's also a USB media player built into the TV and I have a Bluray player with a USB input which also plays MKV/MP4 etc. Or there's other types of standalone players such as WDTV.
An MKV capable Bluray player mightn't be the best choice these days as they have Cinavia copy protection which means they won't play any encoded video which includes Cinavia. Most other media players don't have Cinavia. Personally I use the PC as it's near the TV, more versatile than a standalone player and to be honest it's better at it. The picture quality from the PC is slightly better than when playing the same video using my Sony Bluray player and something more than slightly better when using the TV's built in media player.
