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It can encode files to different sizes, aspect ratios and formats. It is frequently used as a companion to something like MakeMKV, which will do the actual ripping from media to file.

A few weeks back I attempted to purchase it because the consensus among friends is it's the best to convert my home library to my media server.

For ripping and converting video, I've found that MKV + Handbrake works really nicely, and it's free.
http://www.makemkv.com/
I wish more people knew about it instead of those stupid clones that come up better in search results and ask for money.

Wrong, it is in Beta and the developers allow for infinite free updates to the trial license while it remains in beta. Only when the beta is over will anyone need to pay for a license. To update an expired trial license, go to the official MakeMKV forums > News and Announcements > "MakeMKV is free while in beta" thread: http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/...

The latest trial key is available there.

"As stated on a main page all features of MakeMKV are free while program is in beta. You may purchase the full activation key if you like the program and want to show your support, but you also may use the temporary beta key."

MakeMKV is free and not time-limited for DVDs, but costs money and has a time-limited demo available for Blu-rays.

MakeMKV contains both freeware and shareware functionality. You may use MakeMKV to convert or stream DVD and AVCHD discs for free, as much as you want. Converting or streaming Blu-ray discs is shareware functionality. You can use shareware functionality for free during 30-days trial period. If you like MakeMKV and you want to use it after your 30-days trial version expires, you need to purchase a registration key.

source

Netflix and Amazon subscriptions + rip anything worth owning for me. Not bothering with OTA stuff at the moment.

In terms of the ripping/encoding, I use a combination of MakeMKV and Don Melton's transcoding scripts for my blu-rays and DVDs, since they allow me to preserve full surround sound and a high quality video image while encoding in a format that I can use across all of my devices without additional or on-the-fly transcoding (a la Plex) being necessary. I used to use Handbrake for the encoding, but I find that Don's scripts work much better for me and are a lot less fiddly in terms of their output. For now, I'm serving them up from a Mac Mini via iTunes Home Sharing to an Apple TV (and any of the Apple mobile devices in the house), since I found iTunes Home Sharing to be significantly more reliable and easier to manage and use than DLNA or other methods I've tried in the past, but I'm not averse to switching media servers in the future as my needs change, and since the files aren't DRM-encumbered, it'd be trivial for me to do so.

Otherwise, as far as the media hardware goes, I have my PS4, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Dreamcast, and Apple TV all in a closet and hooked up to an Onkyo A/V receiver (TX-NR609) that then goes to my TV. I use the Onkyo AVR's remote for both the AVR and the Apple TV (since the Apple TV can be trained to recognize other remotes in its Settings). Because I keep all of that equipment in the closet (i.e. not in line of sight for IR signals from remotes) I use a Next Generation Battery Transmitter Remote to transmit the IR signals via RF into the closet. Such an awesome product, since, unlike most IR transmitter/receiver devices, it effectively turns your IR remote into an RF remote, meaning that you don't have to have an ugly box sitting next to your TV to catch and retransmit the IR signal. Don't ask me how the thing works, since all I know is that you put the provided RF transmitter in place of a AAA or AA battery in your remote, and somehow it knows what to transmit to the receiving end. And the thing barely ever needs recharging, plus it even has a standard battery size you can buy at Walgreens for the user-replaceable, rechargeable battery it uses.

Sorry for shilling out, but in case it wasn't already obvious, I really do love the little thing, even if it does look like a UFO.

As for OTA TV, meh. My wife has already told me she'll need the Olympics whenever they come around next summer, but NBC just launched a channel on the Apple TV, so I figure we'll just use that, or else we'll stream it via AirPlay to the Apple TV from one of the Macs or iPads in the house.

for hd video, wifi is NO SUBSTITUTE for wired enet.

Bull*.

YouTube provides full 1080p videos at around 3.5 Mbps. If you rip and encode your own blu-ray at home, you'll be on the high end if you come in around 8 Mbps. Netflix serves up 1080p 3D videos that customers can watch on original Playstation 3 models. I routinely rip blu-rays and then compress/encode them at high quality settings for use via iTunes Home Sharing with my Apple TV. I never have to deal with waiting for more than a few seconds before playback starts. You can watch 1080p YouTube on an 802.11b laptop, those PS3s only have 802.11g, and my Apple TV only came with 802.11n. All of this is possible today and working just fine.

It sounds to me like you're blaming WiFi for a problem that lies elsewhere (e.g. misconfigured VLC buffering settings, wrong tools for the job, etc.), since plenty of us have working setups** that deliver HD video over WiFi without issue.

* Unless you're working with uncompressed video, of course, which consumes orders of magnitude more resources. If memory serves, a 1080p uncompressed video feed can be as high as 1.6 Gbps, so if you're dealing with that sort of stuff, then of course you should use wired instead of WiFi. But since we're talking about MKVs for an at-home setup rather than live video capture from an event, I figured we were dealing with compressed HD video. ;)

** Regarding my setup, I just have a typical 802.11n router and an Apple TV for hardware. On the software side, I use MakeMKV with DTS-HD to FLAC encoding enabled to rip my discs. I then use Don Melton's scripts (with the --big flag set) to crop and transcode them, followed up by a quick pass through Subler to add any of the metadata for use in iTunes. After that, I just add them to iTunes, enable Home Sharing in iTunes, and then log in on my Apple TV to gain access to my entire iTunes library. Super simple and works great, even though none of it is wired.

for hd video, wifi is NO SUBSTITUTE for wired enet.

Bull*.

YouTube provides full 1080p videos at around 3.5 Mbps. If you rip and encode your own blu-ray at home, you'll be on the high end if you come in around 8 Mbps. Netflix serves up 1080p 3D videos that customers can watch on original Playstation 3 models. I routinely rip blu-rays and then compress/encode them at high quality settings for use via iTunes Home Sharing with my Apple TV. I never have to deal with waiting for more than a few seconds before playback starts. You can watch 1080p YouTube on an 802.11b laptop, those PS3s only have 802.11g, and my Apple TV only came with 802.11n. All of this is possible today and working just fine.

It sounds to me like you're blaming WiFi for a problem that lies elsewhere (e.g. misconfigured VLC buffering settings, wrong tools for the job, etc.), since plenty of us have working setups** that deliver HD video over WiFi without issue.

* Unless you're working with uncompressed video, of course, which consumes orders of magnitude more resources. If memory serves, a 1080p uncompressed video feed can be as high as 1.6 Gbps, so if you're dealing with that sort of stuff, then of course you should use wired instead of WiFi. But since we're talking about MKVs for an at-home setup rather than live video capture from an event, I figured we were dealing with compressed HD video. ;)

** Regarding my setup, I just have a typical 802.11n router and an Apple TV for hardware. On the software side, I use MakeMKV with DTS-HD to FLAC encoding enabled to rip my discs. I then use Don Melton's scripts (with the --big flag set) to crop and transcode them, followed up by a quick pass through Subler to add any of the metadata for use in iTunes. After that, I just add them to iTunes, enable Home Sharing in iTunes, and then log in on my Apple TV to gain access to my entire iTunes library. Super simple and works great, even though none of it is wired.

...and Linux has software to play blu-ray discs?

Yes. Technically, MakeMKV is a ripper, not a player, but once you have a disc ripped, you can play the ripped file with the player of your choice: VLC, mplayer, etc. You can also stream it over your network, transcode it to take less space, etc.

... If the Linux client was a pre-compiled binary, it could probably be made reasonably secure against people trying to copy content. At least as secure as a DVD or BluRay anyway.

I'd say, you just answered your own question: If a Linux binary could be made "at least as secure as a DVD or BluRay," then Big Media would instantly label it as a non-starter, because optical media is not even remotely secure at this point; all you need to do is pop open MakeMKV, and those movies will come off of the disk in an unencrypted format in short order, ready to be converted by Handbrake for whatever purpose you might find appealing, from PSP to piracy.

Which, I think, is actually the entire point of going to DRMed streaming media... Big Media is actually trying to make it harder to decrypt their content, rather than maintain the status quo.

Honestly I assume that by now it's exceedingly annoying to try to rip those things, and the one I can download from iTunes is pretty much there and good to go in much less time. And spending too much time on it isn't exactly how I want to spend my time these days.

MakeMKV makes it trivial to do a 1:1 rip of your Bluray into an MKV container that has the primary video and audio stream. If you need any conversion after that for tablets etc... Handbrake does the job very well.

http://makemkv.com/ http://handbrake.fr/

Both are really as point can click as it gets.

though the more active nature of Blu-ray does have me concerned.

Rip'em. Cost $50 for a license but well worth it.

I posted this above, but depending on your requirements, Blu-Ray on Linux may not be that tedious.

MakeMKV will take care of ripping the stream for you and Handbrake will transcode from the mkv. Personally, I prefer to not transcode, which means I have the Blu-Ray title in my XBMC library and ready to watch in 30 mins or so. I don't have a huge Blu-Ray library, but I've yet to come across a title it cannot decrypt.

Mostly, I don't need subs, but if you want to transcode and need subtitles, there are methods that aren't painful. Because XBMC is so flexible, it can support a myriad of subtitle formats. If the subtitles add-on for XBMC cannot locate a suitable sub from one of the many online sources (which is rare in my experience), there are several tools that can export the subtitle stream from the mkv into a format XBMC is happy with.
Basically, there are no barriers for me now and although it's not perfect (I'd prefer to be able to buy my media in an open format to begin with), at least I can now enjoy the brilliant high-bitrate video streams of Blu-Ray format in a way that's extremely convenient to me.

I would happily purchase content but I cannot bear the optical media format - mainly due to the fact that I have a centralised media centre with XBMC running on several devices. If I could purchase a disk, rip it straight to the server and never touch it again that would be great. So far, I can handle DVDs to but the anti-ripping measures of BluRay have so far stopped me from upgrading my viewing experience to HD.

I use the same setup and until fairly recently was in the same boat regarding Blu-Ray. Have you tried MakeMKV? Granted you'll have to invest in a BR drive for your PC, but they are not expensive. Now I can enjoy the product I want (the content), in an un-encumbered, transferrable format that's a bit-perfect reproduction of the feature. Also, if I want, I can transcode it to whatever format I feel like.

When I see news about services like Paramount's new online store, I have to shake my head and wonder what on earth the content providers are smoking.

I prefer MakeMKV as its free (as in beer but not in speech)

http://www.makemkv.com/download/

When Avatar came out within a couple of days they had an upgraded version that would you tip your copy.

MakeMKV is easy to use, but it doesn't give you the same freedom that eac3to does. For instance it won't output flac audio and thus the mkv audio will often not play in apps like vlc that don't have DTS-MA decoders. I had a similar problem with trying to use DVDfab which has a feature for automagically ripping a bluray to an mkv file. Very slick but the resulting file doesn't play properly on my PC. Also eac3to gives me the control to alter the audio track in Soundforge which I find is almost always necessary. I also like to change 5.1 or 7.1 audio to 2 channel stereo to reduce file size quite a bit. Automatic systems are nice, but only if they give you enough control to do what you want. To be fair the MakeMKV author is working on the flac output. When he gets around to it I will try the software again.

It seems like Blu-Ray support on Linux a bit limited at the moment, but there is at least some freeware/shareware that can handle it: MakeMKV which has a Linux beta and DVDFab which appears to run under Wine. DumpHD may also be worth looking at.

It seems like Blu-Ray support on Linux a bit limited at the moment, but there is at least some freeware/shareware that can handle it: MakeMKV which has a Linux beta and DVDFab which appears to run under Wine. DumpHD may also be worth looking at.

I used Vista 64 & MakeMKV, not sure what the OP used...

* MakeMKV 1.5.5 Beta (Free) - http://www.makemkv.com/download/
* avatar.svq - http://www.makemkv.com/svq/avatar.svq

Took ~ 2 hours to rip on an Intel 2.5 GHz.

I used Vista 64 & MakeMKV, not sure what the OP used...

* MakeMKV 1.5.5 Beta (Free) - http://www.makemkv.com/download/
* avatar.svq - http://www.makemkv.com/svq/avatar.svq

Took ~ 2 hours to rip on an Intel 2.5 GHz.

> Blu-Ray has, to date, been sufficiently designed to prevent an open source player, right?

Not really.

Here's the link for the download: http://www.makemkv.com/forum2/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=224

MakeMKV 1.4.0 for Linux is available

According to their site, MakeMKV isn't available for Linux yet.