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Beta beat: Backup your Blu-ray discs with MakeMKV

by Aron Trimble Jan 20th 2010 at 2:30PM

You know that it's possible to backup your CDs with iTunes and your DVDs with Handbrake, but what about that new Blu-ray disc (BD) you just received during the holidays? Macworld has a good write-up of a beta utility called MakeMKV that will rip both DVDs and BDs to perfect quality MKV format.

Bear in mind that this will require having a connected or internal Blu-ray drive that can read said discs. This is currently a bit of a novelty in most Macs being that Steve Jobs considers the whole thing a "bag of hurt." However, if your system meets the hardware requirements, you're ready to go off on your first Blu-ray ripping journey without the typical mess involved.

Macworld's test resulted in a file nearly 32 GB in size as compared to the original 35 GB on the physical BD. While this is useful for those of you with a farm of terabyte-sized drives at your disposal, for others, a lower quality backup is acceptable. If space is a concern, or you want to put a copy on your Apple TV, it's possible to use previously-mentioned Handbrake or Video Monkey to transcode into a lower quality (but still excellent) file.

MakeMKV is available now for free while in beta. The Blu-ray ripping functionality is only free while the software is in beta so grab it while you can. Once the beta period ends, only the DVD-ripping will be free.

[via Macworld]

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You know that it's possible to backup your CDs with iTunes and your DVDs with Handbrake, but what about that new Blu-ray disc (BD) you just...
 

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tuaw

Too bad it transcodes rather than just decrypt and copy. Transcoding a lossy codec (H.264, VC-1) is lossy, and I hate the idea of making less than bit-perfect copies of my media.

January 20 2010 at 8:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Marko

"Bare" in mind? Go back to skool.

January 20 2010 at 8:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Cowfodder

You guys missed the best feature. MakeMKV will transcode on the fly, and stream the resulting file accross your network. It takes a little setup, but this is currently how XBMC is able to play Blu-Ray in Linux.

January 20 2010 at 5:37 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Tezgno

Nice. I've been waiting for something like this. I have most of my DVDs in a digital format already. However, the BD's are starting to pile up (I don't have a rack anymore since I started my conversion process about 2 years ago). I can now put my BDs into a format that can be watched on my Apple TV or computers and put those discs into my disc vault (a.k.a. the boxes in my storage with all of my other discs).

January 20 2010 at 4:56 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Miguel P.

MKV is not a video format. It's just a media container, like AVI.

That site is horribly written. I couldn't tell if it did actual transcoding or if it just took the video stream, decrypted it and put it into MKV containers. It confuses a whole bunch of concepts and misuses words like "format" and "transcoding." The MacWorld writeup is much better, it clearly says that MakeMKV does the latter.

They should really revise the stuff that's written in their site if they want to be taken seriously. The way it is now, if I was just browsing casually and stumbled across that, I wouldn't even bother downloading their software.

January 20 2010 at 3:06 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jason

It should be noted that this app only works if you have a BD-R not just a BD-ROM. Your drive needs to have some kind of burning capabilities.

January 20 2010 at 3:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
3 replies to Jason's comment
Marcos

This is something that is not clear from the article:

- Unlike Handbrake, this program does not transcode the video.
- Because of this, the backup is quick... as fast as the data can be read off the disc.

January 20 2010 at 3:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
pax copia

I wish my mBookp had a bd-r drive instead of its antiquated dvd-r one. In general it's just sad how out of date the latest from apple is.

January 20 2010 at 2:50 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mark

Okay, how long before this company is sued into oblivion by the
establishment?

January 20 2010 at 2:47 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to mark's comment
CHRiS

It's pretty pathetic companies that make tools to allow you to back up your own media will get sued. I mean, I suppose with Bush's Digital Millennium Act its illegal to circumvent the encryption, so if you want a backup you'll have to *legally* download an already decrypted version.

January 20 2010 at 2:51 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Aron Trimble

Actually, it wasn't Bush. The DMCA was passed on October 12, 1998 by a unanimous vote in the Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998

January 20 2010 at 3:01 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
lane

Ho about smething that does the same or similar for HD-DVD? I have a few from whenif they ever were cool. But nonetheless. Anyone know of a WinApp for that?

Thanks!

Faslane

January 20 2010 at 2:46 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to lane's comment
CHRiS

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

January 20 2010 at 2:49 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
R L

MakeMKV says they have limited support for HD-DVD as well.

January 20 2010 at 4:55 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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