Note: If you've read this guide already (or when you've read it) then going through all of it each time you want to rip something can be a bit of a pain, especially when you just need your memory jogging on one particular section. Because of that, I've put together a quick "cheat sheet" here which acts as a handy reference just to jog your memory on each key step.





I've seen a few guides around on ripping DVDs, but fewer for Blu-rays, and many miss what I believe are important steps (such as ensuring the correct foreign language subtitles are preserved!) While ripping your entire DVD collection would have seemed insane due to storage requirements even a few years ago, these days it can make perfect sense.





This guide doesn't show you a one click approach that does all the work for you, it's much more of a manual process. But the benefits of putting a bit more effort in really do pay off - you get to use entirely free tools with no demo versions, it's reliable and works with all discs I've tried it with (bar one that was heavily scratched!), you get much more control over the quality / file size ratio and quality / encode time ratio, you can ensure any forced subtitles are correctly transferred across - the list goes on. You can also be sure that you get a high quality, completely DRM-free rip that you can do with as you choose without fear that some built in time bomb is going to stop the file from ever playing again if you transfer it to another computer.





Usual disclaimer that this isn't necessarily legal in your country, so check first and proceed with caution - I present this as a technical guide on the process only. If you are going to do it, just make a single personal copy.

Tools

I'll detail the tools used as we go, but it may make sense to install them ahead of time so you can follow the article more easily.

- We'll be using this to rip the raw files from the disc, this works with both Blu-rays and DVDs. If MakeMKV complains about not having a license key, grab the latest one from

.

- We'll be using this to compress the file that MKV generates down to a more reasonable size.

VLC - We'll be using this to play / check the MKV files. Any media player that can play them will do, but if you're not sure grab this since it definitely does.





MKVExtract - We'll be using this to extract subtitle streams.

Subtitle Edit - We'll be using this to convert subtitles into a better format.





The Initial Rip Put your disc in the drive and load up MakeMKV (get rip of any auto-playing DVD players that might pop up.) You should be presented with something like the following:







Select the correct optical drive from the list if you have more than one (unlikely these days) and then hit the big button. MakeMKV will then proceed to analyse your disc, which may well take a while - when it's done it'll show you the titles, like so:





There may be as few as one title, or tens of titles depending on the disc. If your DVD contains a film, then you want to select the title with the largest size (in this case that's the first one, 6.2GB.) If it's a TV show you're ripping, you should have selected one title for each episode, and they should all be around the same size (ish.) The other titles are likely extras we don't care about, so we'll deselect those. If there's any titles you're unsure about, just include them anyway - it'll take a bit longer to rip, but that's better than doing the whole disc again!



Expand the view for your chosen title, and you'll likely see something like this:





Each title contains various tracks, and it's these tracks that you're seeing here - the video track is the one at the top (which you definitely want!) there's audio tracks in different languages, and various subtitle tracks. However, I'm not interested in most of these, so I can deselect them. Presuming you're English go ahead and deselect all apart from the audio track that says "English" and the subtitles tracks that say "English" (do this even if you don't care about subtitles, I'll explain later, honest!) Careful if there's more than one audio track that says English that you select the right one (there may be a couple of others, for instance directors commentaries or audio subtitles. The one you want is usually the first "English" one on the list, and usually the one with the highest quality audio (it's often the only one to have surround sound for instance.)



For Blu-rays the view looks slightly different but essentially the same:



The thing to make sure of here is that you select the "DTS-HD Lossless English" audio as well as the normal "DTS 3/2+1" subitem, to make sure you copy all the uncompressed audio across from the disc. You also have a better option with subtitles, in that you can just tick "English (forced only)" as I have here, rather than checking all the tracks.



Select an output folder for the files (I usually make a temporary folder on the desktop to store them in) then hit the Make MKV button, and wait! It has to pull all the data off the disc, so will take quite a while. On my machine it's usually around 20 minutes for a DVD, up to an hour for a Blu-ray. Yours may be longer though, so be patient!



Test the MKV files When MakeMKV is finished, open each file in VLC and check it's what you think it is - you can then delete any MKV files from titles you don't want, and if you like rename any MKV files so you know what they are more easily (episode 1, episode 2) for instance.

You should now have a rip of whatever DVD or Blu-ray you chose, congratulations! However, take a look at the file size - it's likely huge (it may be around 6 or 7GB for a DVD, and around 30GB for a Blu-ray.) Rip your whole collection and leave it like that, and unless you have access to a colossal amount of storage, you'll run out of space rather quickly! You may also not want an MKV file, you may want something to play on your ipod or similar. The next steps will involve reducing the file size down to around 1/3 of what it is at the moment with no noticeable loss in quality (there are various tradeoffs in this sense over file size and quality, we'll get to those later.)

Checking the subtitles This is important! This is the part that most guides miss, but can unknowingly wreck many films if you miss this bit out! What we'll do here is check whether the film has any forced subtitles, and if so translate them into a better format.

Forced subtitles are those that appear even when subtitles are normally disabled, and usually contain captions to translate foreign languages spoken by characters in a film. If you're sure that your chosen film or TV show contains no such captions then you can skip this step, but if you're not sure then follow it anyway to check, otherwise your rip may have large parts you can't understand! This page gives a rough idea of some films that have forced subs, but it's by no means comprehensive.

When MakeMKV is finished, you should have a folder with an MKV file in for each title (for films, this will likely just be one MKV.) Fire up the MKVExtract GUI, and drag the MKV file onto it. You'll get a screen that looks a bit like this:









Select each track that says subtitles, make sure "use source dir for output" is checked and then hit "Extract." (If you hit "English (force only)" and had a Blu-ray disc, and there's no subtitle tracks here, that's fine - it's because there's no forced subtitles and you can skip this step.) When it's done, you should then have a .idx and a .sub file (just a .sup file if you're doing this for a blu-ray) for each subtitle track in the same folder as the mkv file. Examine the size of these files (ignore any idx files for this step.) Take the largest file, which will probably be the full subtitles for the film. Now have a look at the other sub / sup files, is there any one that's significantly less (less than half the size) of the others? If there is, you've likely found your forced subtitle track, and this is the one you'll want to include in your final rip. If not and the files are all around the same size, then you can likely skip the rest of this step and continue.



However, there are times when the forced subtitles are mixed in the same track as the normal subtitles (rare, the only discs I've found that do this thus far are the Game of Thrones DVDs), so if that's the case you'll need to export the entire file and just save the forced subs to the srt file (covered later on.)





This is a typical example that does have a forced subtitle track from an episode of Game of Thrones (Blu-ray):





We can clearly see two sup files, one around 16MB and the other around 44KB. It's the late 44KB one that's the forced track in this case, used when the Dothraki are speaking (Game of Thrones viewers will know what I mean!) This is a particularly extreme example - the forced subtitle track only has two lines, so in many cases it may be larger (but in almost all cases, significantly smaller than the main subtitle track.)





If you used a Blu-ray and clicked the forced only option, you can bypass this check - if there is a sup file there then you have your forced track in front of you. If not, there were no forced subtitles you need to worry about, and you can skip this step.





Of course, I'm assuming here that you don't want the full subtitle track; you may well do, for instance if the film is in a foreign language throughout - in this case, do the following for each subtitle track you want in your final rip.





You could just leave it at that, but here (this is the comprehensive guide, after all!) we're going to convert to SRT format. SRT subtitles use text as the format rather than an image, which gives a number of advantages - it takes up much less space than an sub / sup track, you can customise the colour / font / size of the subtitles trivially within the application that's playing them, you can trivially make any corrections if there's spelling mistakes (has been known to happen!) and they will be rendered smoothly on any resolution screen. In the case of DVDs, SRT files also look much better on any modern monitor or television, since they're rendered in the native resolution rather than displayed in scaled up, blocky 704x576.



Load up Subtitle Edit, and open the sub or sup file. You'll be presented with a screen similar to this:









Hit the "Start OCR" button, then subtitle edit will go through and OCR the entire subtitle file. For most foreign language subtitles this won't take long at all - you'll see it as it goes through, and if it gets stuck it'll prompt you to check that it's got it right (or provide a correction if it hasn't.)



If you're converting a track that has a mixture of forced and non-forced subtitles, and you just want the forced (foreign language) subs, then you'll need to check the "show only forced subtitles" checkbox.





When done, you'll be taken to the main subtitle edit window with the subtitles displayed. All you need to do now is save it (File -> Save), - ".srt" should be selected as the file type by default, but if not, change it so it's definitely in srt format rather than another type.





Repeat this process for each MKV file you have - in the case of TV shows, this may be a few per disc. When you've got more than one title to do, make sure you know what subtitle file goes with what episode!





Transcoding / Compressing

Almost there - just one more step! Open up handbrake and drag your MKV file onto it (ignore any warning that appears about automatically named output files.)



If you have a subtitles track (srt file as created above), click on the subtitles tab, click import SRT, and locate your srt file you saved earlier. Make sure the "Default" checkbox is selected (important!), and you should end up with something like this:

















When you've sorted the subtitles out, click the "Browse" button and select your destination location.





Don't click on "Start" just yet. You could, and you'd end up with a perfectly playable MKV or MP4 file on handbrake's default settings, but it may not be what you want.





Are you ripping this specifically for a device? If so, click on the preset on the right hand side and then click Start. These should encode relatively quickly, if you're unhappy with the result then just re-encode with the Video Quality slider set a bit higher - find it on the video tab (set it to something like 19 instead of 20 - yes, a lower number is better quality!)





However, if you're just ripping it to have as part of a media centre (which is what I do) then I'd recommend my process (see Note 2), which is adjusting the settings from Handbrake's default to the following: