Total Newbie Questions

Ok, well I have got a few questions about Blu-Ray and i'm hoping to find the answers here. (sorry if the answers are already here somewhere but it would take hours to wade through all old posts)

I'm considering buying a Blu-Ray drive for my laptop but as i've never experienced watching 1 I wonder is it worth the money considering the cost of the disks.
I've pondered over this for a long time and now i'm expecting a bit of cash flowing my way I think it's time to decide.

I wanted to know if it was possible to get a ripped file from a dvd and watch it via the laptop to see the quality and justify buying the drive. so i've looked through the forum and found that this is possible using the current codec pack I have (k-lite codec pack)and the files I saw mentioned were .mkv or .nHD but it seems they are all 720p and if i'm going to be making a proper comparison then I should at least be using 1080p file but I have no idea what this file extension is or whether it is watchable on the laptop (connected to the tv of course).

When i have looked for blu-ray films on torrent pond the files are around 1.7 to 3gb and i thought maybe that was a bit low considering the disk holds 25gb and dvd holds 7.

I also wanted to know what resolution & framerate a film should be if it was hd and i wanted to convert it to blu-ray and what is the best program for doing so? And around what size should this hd file be?

so in a nutshell:
1 Can I watch a 1080p blu-ray ripped file on my laptop using k-lite codecs? and what is the file extension?
2 What size should this ripped file be?
3 If I wanted to convert a hd movie to blue ray what framerate should it be or can I just use any 1920x1080 file and the converter would do the rest?
4 best program for this?

 

I'll try to help. I really think that blu_ray is really worth the money.
Since your talking about getting the files from another source what you can do is burn them to a dvd and play them on your laptop w/ a media player that supports it or w/ VLC and K-pac codec pack. Or you can just play the files right off your HDD.
W/ TSMUXER you can mux the files into M2TS or str8 into a blu-ray disc format. The best I can remember right now 1080x720 is the lowest res. To be blu-ray compliant. Now the file can be compressed down to whatever size. Video that is. You still have to allow for audio, subs,headers, etc. I use tsmuxer, avisynth, megui, and imgburn to do about all my work.

 

I
'll try to help. I really think that blu_ray is really worth the money.
Since your talking about getting the files from another source what you can do is burn them to a dvd and play them on your laptop w/ a media player that supports it or w/ VLC and K-pac codec pack. Or you can just play the files right off your HDD.
W/ TSMUXER you can mux the files into M2TS or str8 into a blu-ray disc format. The best I can remember right now 1080x720 is the lowest res. To be blu-ray compliant. Now the file can be compressed down to whatever size. Video that is. You still have to allow for audio, subs,headers, etc. I use tsmuxer, avisynth, megui, and imgburn to do about all my work.

 

I want to get 1 from another source to check it over but want to know what the file extension is to find one