Blu-Ray on Linux – Part 2

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After a lot of consideration between a dedicated hardware blu-ray player and a blu-ray drive, we prepared to take advantage of Newegg’s $49.99 Blu-Ray drive.

At the last minute, we changed to a $129.99 Blu-Ray burner, so we can experiment with blu-ray burning as well as play-back under Linux.

We installed it in a secondary computer, as opposed to our production system, and installed the MakeMKV beta for Linux. It compiled without incident, and was able to rip our test Blu-Ray video to a test drive.

Now, we want to emphasize this very clearly. WE HAVE NO INTENTION OF DISTRIBUTING ANY ILLEGAL VIDEO. Our intention is to be able to exercise our fair use and playback our legally purchased or legally rented videos.

It is a pain in the butt to have to spend this time ripping the Blu-Ray before we can play it. But that is the price we pay for our open-source lifestyle choice.

We figure, for our legally owned(not rented) Blu-Rays, we have two options.

  1. Rip the Blu-Ray, watch it, then delete the working files. This seems to make sense, as a single movie rip is taking up 30GB on a drive. How many of those is it worth storing.
  2. Do above, but create a lower-quality archival copy that can fit on a single DVD. Our first blu-ray came with a digital copy on a separate DVD that can only be played under Windows, so we might as well discard that disc and replace it with our on archival DVD.

Either of these, again, involve a fair amount of preprocessing and working space, however. In the meantime, however, we have a new movie to watch.

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2 thoughts on “Blu-Ray on Linux – Part 2”

  2. I would say option #1. Hard drives are so cheap now (per gigabyte, they’re very nearly on par with blank DVD’s) and once you’ve ripped the movie, you have it there indefinitely and can put the original back in the box where it is safest.

    I have actually decided to shift towards a HD cradle system, since it takes up less space and gives me close to on-demand access. Just as soon as I find a sufficiently good deal on a hard drive and a decent hard drive docking station with an eSATA port.

    So, what has been the result of your experiment? And how much time does it take you to rip a blu-ray, anyway?

    – me –

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