I'm a little confused from all these guides and reading. Perhaps there is an easier solution. What I'm looking for is a just ripper and a player. I'm fine to pay for either, but if there is a good free one why not be frugal. One thing I don't understand is why we must convert Blu-ray movies? I can't just have the Video_TS (or equivalent) folder and all the files therein? Here is the DVD drive I just bought: LG Electronics GGC-H20L LightScribe Blu-ray/HD DVD Combo Drive Am I to understand correctly that this drive read speed maxes out at 1.5Gbps? So there is no need for a 3Gbps SATA cable? Thanks for your help, I'm usually pretty intuitive with stuff like this but converting from a standard to Blu-ray library has me mind in knots. If you need, here are my comp specs: HP Pavilion Elite d5000t Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 @ 2.5 GHz 8 GB Ballistix PC2-6400 @ 800 MHz nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX 512 MB GDDR3 4x1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda Twin HP w2207h HDMI 22" LCD
It's a very confusing topic, and I myself am still trying to fit all the pieces together. There is a comprehensive guide stickied at the top of this forum. You need to buy AnyDVD HD. That is a must-have. It removes the copy protection so that you can do whatever you want with your movie. Everything else is freeware. You don't need to do any "converting." AnyDVD allows you to do a direct rip to a blu ray folder structure (the VIDEO_TS equivalent). Of course, you will eat up tons of hard drive space. Ripbot64 allows you to encode the movie to a smaller size. People do this because you can compress a 20GB movie to half that size or more and still maintain good quality. There are numerous settings to play around with that will allow you to achieve an encode using h264 compression that is smaller in size and near perfect in quality when compared to the source. Lots of people are satisfied with much smaller file sizes. Doing a search, you can find many .mkv video files (the most popular HD movie container) in either 720p or 1080p video resolution. Most 720p rips you'll find are created to fit on a DVD-5, and lots of 1080p rips are created to fit on a DVD-9. How you want to encode depends on how you want to view your movie and how much hard drive space you are willing to purchase to hold them all (I'm assuming that you are only interested in ripping, since your LG is only a reader and not a burner). Well, that is a quick summary. Any other questions you have I would recommend going to the sticky at the top of this forum.
