Ripping blurays onto a diskdriveless iMac

[TreasonsBeta]

Currently, I am working off of a 27" iMac with no disk drive. I would like to rip my own Blu-Rays for my videos but I've never worked off of a USB based drive. I know mac ones are harder to come by in terms of selection available. So I ask if any of you have any suggestions as to which brand of drive to buy if I want to start ripping Blu-Rays, and potentially down the line, 4k videos if that is even possible. After that, I'm sure I'll need a new software to rip the videos. I used handbrake years ago for some DVD's but the quality of the rip was cringeworthy and I'm not sure if it will even do Blu-Rays. The software would also have to be Mac friendly as I don't have a partitioned windows operating system on this computer.

Here are some possibilites

- Blu-Ray rippers -
Pioneer BDR-XD05B 6x Slim
VicTsing External Blu-Ray Drive,Slim USB 3.0
TopElek USB 3.0 External Blu Ray Player Writer
LG Electronics External Optical Drive Optical Drives WP50NB40
ASUS Computer International Direct ASUS BW-16D1X-U Blu-ray Drive

- Ripping Software -
Acrok Video Converter Ultimate
Leawo Blu-ray Ripper
Aimersoft Blu-ray Ripper
MakeMKV

Thanksk in advance for any helpful tips you might have for the process.

Keith Treason

[Kionon]

Currently, I am working off of a 27" iMac with no disk drive. I would like to rip my own Blu-Rays for my videos but I've never worked off of a USB based drive. I know mac ones are harder to come by in terms of selection available.

Howdy Keith, I'm going to move this to the Mac forum, but I'll respond first. I have a Pioneer drive I bought waaaaaaaay back when BD drives first came out. It was external for a long, long time. Now it's in my 2008 Mac Pro and still works just fine. Therefore, my natural proclivity would be to suggest you go with Pioneer. Make sure than any external is USB 3.0, you are going to want those speeds for data transfer. Strictly speaking, there shouldn't actually be any Mac specific ones, unless you want to actually play BDs directly off of the disc. Mine was not designed for Mac specifically, and it works just fine. I just bought it from a typical electronics store.

MakeMKV is what you want for software. Period. It just rips the streams as is and puts them into an MKV file. Then from there you can do what you want to the streams, convert to lossless like UT Video or whatever typical codec you use to edit in, etc, etc.

[Qyot27]

Ripping UHD discs is currently trickier. You need a 'UHD Friendly' drive (read: pre-AACS2.0 drive that can still read BDXL media), and you also need the keys for the particular title you want to rip, at least as far as MakeMKV (or playback with libaacs and KEYDB.cfg through VLC or mpv) goes. Other ripping software is either getting it to a point of not needing a user-provided key list, or being able to use the 'UHD Ready' drives, but I don't know how much progress has been made there.

The drive with the most reported successes for UHD discs is the Asus BW-16D1HT. Do not upgrade the firmware, and hope that it isn't shipped with new firmware. There are either SATA-to-USB cables or 5.25" drive enclosures that you can use to make it external.

[Kionon]

Other ripping software is either getting it to a point of not needing a user-provided key list, or being able to use the 'UHD Ready' drives, but I don't know how much progress has been made there.

Examples?

[Qyot27]

I'm thinking DeUHD have already managed it (maybe; the distinction between 'UHD Friendly' or not was originally theirs), and DVD Fab apparently uses DeUHD's 4K support now. I'm not exactly sure how rigorous that support is, though. It's eventually a design goal for MakeMKV as stated on the forum there, but still no ETA as far as I know.

The two 4K discs I own had their keys added to the publicly available KEYDB.cfg to use with MakeMKV, and I have the BW-16D1HT. So that let me test it out; I couldn't find any immediate problem with the output, except that neither of my mini-PCs were able to keep up with decoding 10bit HEVC in 4K (my tablet could, though).

[Kionon]

The two 4K discs I own had their keys added to the publicly available KEYDB.cfg to use with MakeMKV, and I have the BW-16D1HT. So that let me test it out; I couldn't find any immediate problem with the output, except that neither of my mini-PCs were able to keep up with decoding 10bit HEVC in 4K (my tablet could, though).

So you're not seeing any problems on macOS currently?

Also, how does UHD differ from 1080P BD? Would me 10 year old Pioneer drive even be able to handle 4K discs, or would I need a new drive entirely? Not that I think I can imagine a situation where I am ever actually going to edit in 4K.

[Qyot27]

The two 4K discs I own had their keys added to the publicly available KEYDB.cfg to use with MakeMKV, and I have the BW-16D1HT. So that let me test it out; I couldn't find any immediate problem with the output, except that neither of my mini-PCs were able to keep up with decoding 10bit HEVC in 4K (my tablet could, though).

So you're not seeing any problems on macOS currently?

I haven't tried on macOS, it was more of a general statement because of the drive list in the OP (and because MakeMKV should work exactly the same, no matter if it's Windows, macOS, or Linux). The iMac in our house would be difficult to set the BD drive next to and its USB ports have always had issues.

Also, how does UHD differ from 1080P BD? Would me 10 year old Pioneer drive even be able to handle 4K discs, or would I need a new drive entirely? Not that I think I can imagine a situation where I am ever actually going to edit in 4K.

It does require a newer drive. BDXL was only added to the Blu-ray spec in 2010, and it was 3 or 4 years after that when drives supporting it started showing up.

The difference between UHD and 1080p BD, as far as I can tell, is the disc media (triple or quadruple-layer BDXL up to 128GB capacity), the use of 10-bit HEVC @ 4K using HDR/Rec.2020, and a newer form of the AACS DRM. The filesystem structure appears to be virtually the same, as software like libbluray only required minor fixes to recognize a UHD rip and play it back. Two ways in which it looks simpler than normal Blu-ray is that it only supports progressive video, and it also doesn't use region locking.

[Kionon]

It does require a newer drive. BDXL was only added to the Blu-ray spec in 2010, and it was 3 or 4 years after that when drives supporting it started showing up.

Probably not worth it. I work with sources that are barely 1080p as it is, and I'll mostly be releasing 720p versions to begin with. Working in 4K for AMVs is several years in the future. And by that time, we will probably have 8K nonsense.

[Qyot27]

True. After checking CDJapan, there's currently not very much anime that's been released in 4K yet anyway. Most of it looks like things either old enough to have been re-scanned from film, or new enough that it may have been produced in 4K.

[Kionon]

True. After checking CDJapan, there's currently not very much anime that's been released in 4K yet anyway. Most of it looks like things either old enough to have been re-scanned from film, or new enough that it may have been produced in 4K.

I'm still not working in 1080p, and a fair amount of anime I would be working with are basically just upscales anyway. How much anime is even being produced in 4K? And haven't a lot of classic series only recently gotten 1080p re-scans themselves? Like I THINK Utena just got a BD set quite recently. I cannot imagine we will be seeing 4K Utena anytime soon.