Ripping a Blu-ray disc to your harddrive is possible, but is it worth it? Turns out you might be better of just buying the disc.
A few days ago, I came across Gizmodo’s excellent how-to on ripping Blu-ray discs. The post itself mentions that it isn’t easy, but I wanted numbers. So I took the example Dark Knight movie and got counting. Just buying the Blu-ray disc will set you back €26.99 at Mediadis. But how much does it cost to make (and keep) a copy?
Here is a list of what you need for rip that disc and how much it’ll cost. I’ve omitted free stuff to keep the list short and used local euro prices (but I doubt there will be large differences on other continents):
- AnyDVD HD: If you’re justing ripping one disco, it’s free. If you’re ripping many discs, it will costs you. Lets assume you’ll rip 63 discs during one year and before a better solution comes along. So that’s €1 for the software (I think that’s a very conservative, it’ll probably be more expensive and I hate AnyDVD’s liscensing model BTW)
- Harddrive. You need 50+GB for the ripped data, plus whatever size your resulting video will be. On top of that you’ll need some temporary space to do the transcoding between the Blu-ray format and the one you need. Lets assume 80GB, which is again pretty conservative. And lets assume you want to keep it portable, so lets go for a USB harddrive. A 500GB model seems to be the most interesting size/cost-wise. You can get one for about €65, so 80GB will cost you about €10.
- Computer time. This depends on computer and I’ve only added the things mentioned in the article, as I don’t yet have invested in HD equipment and certainly no Blu-ray yet. It will take 1 hour to rip the disco to hard drive and I’m guestimating about 4 hours to transcode it to a different format (eg. for your iPod or digital video recorder)
- The power your computer consumes. Again, we will need to make a bunch of assumptions, but lets keep them conservative. A 250 Watt machine running for 5 hours, requires 1,25 kWh. At €0,20/kWh or less, this cost seems negligable. However, keep in mind that you also need to be running that harddrive and that your computer will be performing at almost peak performance during the entire transcoding session, so it’s probably going to consume more than 250 Watts. Lets assume €1 because you did the transcoding during the night and left your PC on for 8+ hours anyway.
- Your time. To set up the entire software stack, you’ll need at least an hour. You’ll need to start the different steps in the process and do quality control in between. You also will not be able to use that PC during the operation (not for gaming at least, probably web surfing will be possible). I value my time pretty highly, but you might be different.
So in conclusion: Without taking into account the value of your time lost, ripping and storing a Blu-ray in 2 formats (original and iPod-ready) will set you back €12. You will probably need to invest 1 hour of time for every disc you want to rip. So if you value your time at about €15/hour, you might want to go ahead and do this.
Personally, I think my time is a lot more valueable, so I wouldn’t bother with it. But I don’t even have a Blu-ray drive yet, so as always, you’ll have to make up your own mind.