::Backing up blu ray, best choice?!::

Why not just use multiple external USB hard disc drives in the terabyte size range? Just disconnect them and put away on a shelf when full. Hard disc drive storage is very cheap these days.

Use Slysoft's AnyDVD HD to "rip to image" to get an exact copy of the BD on a hard drive. This will give the best chance of always working. When new versions of BD+ come out it takes Slysoft a few weeks to get updated to handle it but they have a great track record of always doing so. You can always then playback/decrypt/re-author the BD any way you like later.

Err, it's illegal to rip BDs in the US. There's no fair use option. DRM or nothing.....

Seggers

If you can play the files on your PC then you should be able to play them on a PS3 via streaming and PS3 media server. I know it works great with DVD ISO files.

Not yet tested in the US courts. There are those who do claim to see a "fair use" clause in the DMCA. We might be able to see if ever a case against a home user who does not share ends up going to court.

IANAL

Your best bet is to store them on 1-2 TB HDD's.
Use AnyDVD to copy the discs.
Yes-you are technically breaking the law, but if you own the discs, then I doubt the FBI will be breaking down your door and dragging you off to jail.
By ripping the discs, you are circumventing the nasty DRM which the abomination called the DCMA outlawed and essentially nullified the concept of fair-use.
Guess who wrote this legislation?

Real v MPAA, Real lost
Slysoft is located in Antigua which should be safe from MPAA lobbyist.

That case does not apply for the home user who is not selling or sharing anything. The judge in the case you are referring to even said so!

http://www.videobusiness.com/article...nk&rid=5433975

I'm sorry, but that's just false. CDs have no inherent copy protection systems and thus aren't governed by the "anti-circumvention" clauses of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. DVDs and BDs do have copy protection systems and fall squarely within these prohibitions.

Judge Patel's observation about the applicability of fair-use doctrines in these cases has a certain "Through the Looking Glass" quality to it. It may be legal to create personal back up copies, but not legal to acquire the software needed to do so. That's what constitutes copyright law in our current topsy-turvy world. We'll start seeing other instances like this soon as applied to digitized books. Kindle owners don't actually "own" any of the books they read, they just have a license to read them. So much for first-sale rights.

I never understood how Real thought they would win their case after the way we treated DVDJon and DeCSS. However I'm still a bit surprised that we have yet to see a free speech claim concerning the legality of transferring the source code for things like libdvdcss. If I download a copy of the source for mplayer, which includes the code to break CSS and play DVDs, then compile it on my computer here, does this constitute a DMCA violation? Is it different from distributing the compiled binary for mplayer? Why or why not?

You forgot this part of your quote which you didn't highlight:

"federal law bars companies from making or selling the tools to allow them to do so."

But Slysoft does not fall under US federal laws...so it gets cloudy because the judge first said "consumers have a fair use right to make a backup of a DVD for their personal use".

Also, no one is going to search your home for backed up DVDs.

SlySoft Terms & Conditions

http://www.slysoft.com/en/terms.html

Cool, they are based in Mahon, Cork, Ireland and offer a 20% discount.

I'm sorry, Lee, but I fail to see the relevance of this document. Can you tell me what specifically you're suggesting we read? Nowhere do I see anything about its compliance with US laws or whether importation or use of the software is legal in the US. I wouldn't expect to see that, of course, since Slysoft sells its products worldwide.

Depends.. what do you want to do? Do you just want to back them up completely? Do you want to just make digital copies for use as a Home Media Server and be able to play them on DLNA devices or just hold them as backup? Are you willing to sacrifice audio quality?

Two ways about it.

If you want to create an identical replica of your Blu-ray movie on the hard drive as backup only with no network playback on DLNA devices you can do simply the following:

1. AnyDVD HD to hard disk
2. Use BDClown (includes TSMuxer)
3. Pick off audio and stuff you don't need and just keep Video and Audio track and mux it all back into new Blu-ray structure or ISO file or a simple M2TS file.

If you want to make the files playable on your HTPC you should do the following:

1. AnyDVD HD

2. Demux files into mkv and FLAC or AC3 640kbps|DTS 1.5mbps core

3. Use meGUI (alternatively) to re-encode your mkv file into CQ (Constant Quality - with 20 setting). meGUI has FAST/FASTER/FASTEST setting as well. I use FAST setting and CQ at 20 because this gives me absolutely identical quality to Blu-ray video track with much higher bitrate but the size is half of what the original is. Trust me, I literally checked frame by frame of re-encoded video vs original in Photoshop before I settled on this setting because I didn't want to lose any quality. FAST setting will re-encode a movie in about 10-20% more time than what the actual play time of the movie is. So for a movie of 1 hour and 30 mins I re-encode in about 2 hours. This is on an 8-core Mac Pro (2008 model) but it's also similar time on my i7 3.0ghz (which is quad-core but with 8 threads).

4. Once my mkv is re-encoded I use Haali MKVMerge and take the FLAC or AC3 or DTS-Core audio track and mux the re-encoded mkv file and the audio track. This process usually takes about 10 mins.

5. Done.

Now keep in mind, I personally keep 2 copies. One copy is with MKV video, uncompressed and FLAC audio tracks. My playback versions of the movies for use with Xbox 360 Windows Media Center or PS3 are all encoded as AC3 640kbps 5.1 audio (which is either directly extracted from TrueHD tracks) or decoded with ArcSoft Total Media Theater decoder through EAC3TO and encoded with libAften to high quality AC3 640kbps but directly from DTS-HD/DTS-MA/LPCM tracks so I keep the best audio mix possible.

Don't forget. Audio tracks on Blu-ray movies are NOT DRM-ed. So you can use EAC3TO program to directly rip audio tracks from Blu-ray movies without AnyDVD HD if you need to extract the audio for some reason down the road.

Cheers.

MakeMKV works fairly well to convert a BR disc to mkv files for viewing on a Mac, since the Mac can't directly view BR's. It takes about 40 minutes to convert all of the BR files to mkv (on a 6-core Nehalem Mac Pro) and includes all audio tracks and subtitles tracks. My owned copy of Sideways is on a 50GB disc and converts to a 33GB main feature, which is pretty good size. If I use Handbrake to convert it to h264 it cuts it down to 4GB, still 1080 but I lose the subtitles, since Handbrake can't read sup files. Still good for viewing purposes, not for archiving.

I LOVE MakeMKV, pop in the disk, select the movie, regular and forced subtitles, and the HD sound track and let it rip. It takes about 20 - 30 minutes to rip a movie and I end up with a nice clean full quality file of just the movie and none of the Blu Ray "bonus" junk.

I have a Sony s580 bluray player. It will play .m2ts files. I have been playing with it streaming my full bluray rips. I have full gigabit to the player from my ubuntu box. The movie begins to stiffer around 35 mbps. Player has an info bar that displays the bitrate. I have searched the forums but can't seem to find a way to keep my bitrate has high as possible in order for player to run smooth. Handbrake will let me set at a max 20 mbps average bitrate. Anyways wanting to know the best way to bring my .m2ts file and set the bitrate under that 35mbps. I'll use .MKV or .m2ts but I want to keep as much quality as possible. Obviously I understand that there will be a loss with reencoding a file.