Hollywood wants you to buy its movies on DVD and Blu-ray disc, but then it wants to control what you do with them once you get home. We’re going to show you how to do something that Hollywood most definitely does not want you to do: Copy those movies to your hard drive or media server so that you can enjoy them without ever having to get off your couch to drop a disc in your DVD player.

Once you have the movie on your hard drive, you can do all kinds of other neat stuff with it, such as transcode it to another format so you can watch it on a handheld digital media player—or delete those annoying messages from the FBI and Interpol messages warning you of the penalties for doing what we’re about to show you how to do.

While we fully acknowledge that the movie industry has the right to protect its intellectual property, we also believe that consumers have the right to enjoy the property they purchase. The concept is called fair use: If you bought a movie on DVD, you should have the right to make a back-up copy of it or transfer the content to another medium, such as your computer’s hard drive. You don’t have the right distribute copies of that disc to anyone else, of course, and you don’t have the right to copy discs you don’t own, e.g, movies you borrow from a friend or rent from Netflix. But you knew that already.

What You Need

If you’ve ever converted a music CD, you’ll find that the process of converting a movie to be only slightly more complicated. Converting and transcoding a DVD, however, takes more time and a lot more horsepower. You’ll need a fairly current CPU (a dual- or quad-core), a DVD-ROM drive, and some software. DVDs are nearly always copy protected, which means you’ll need a software program capable of breaking that encryption. This is where you turn outlaw, because the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) turns anyone who circumvents copy protection into a bona fide criminal.

But let’s get real. The chances of the Hollywood Gestapo storming your front porch, kicking your door in, and dragging you off to court for copying movies you’ve legitimately purchased for your own personal use are somewhere between slim and none. But if this makes you as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, or if it just bothers your conscience, stop reading now.

Why choose Xilisoft Blu Ray Converter

• Convert Blu-ray discs with high converting speed and excellent HD-quality
• Convert Blu-ray M2TS videos to iPod videos and common videos
• Extract audio from Blu-ray movie and capture movie images
• Edit video by trimming, cropping, merging and adding video effects
• The broad support of multimedia devices
• Try it for FREE NOW: Xilisoft Blu Ray Converter

How to convert Blu-ray movie

This is the step by step guide of Xilisoft Blu Ray Converter to show you how to convert Blu-ray disc to iPod.

1. Free download at: Xilisoft Blu Ray Converter, install and launch.

2. Insert the blu-ray disc and choose the proper output destination and the target video format.

3. Click "Convert" button! After a few minutes waiting, the conversion from blu-ray disc to iPod is completed!

More information

One of the reasons converting DVDs is more complicated than converting a CD is that movie discs contain more than one type of media—there’s the video, of course, but then there’s the multi-track audio, navigation menus, subtitles, and so on. All this media is wrapped into a special type of file known as a container, and you’ll need to decide which type of container file to create before you convert the DVD. Most people choose either MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14) or MKV (Matroska Multimedia Container). We’ve chosen MP4 because it’s supported by a wide variety of media players on both the PC and the Mac, as well as most portable players.

When the program is finished, play the resulting file in your media player of choice to make sure you’re satisfied with how things came out. If you have a lot of DVDs you’d like to convert all at once, take advantage of Handbrake’s batch-processing feature and transcode them automatically and sequentially. Use AnyDVD or a similar program to copy each disc’s VIDEO_TS file to your computer’s hard drive (or to your server or NAS box). These will be very large files, obviously, so take care that you don’t fill your drive beyond its capacity (a too-full hard drive can have a significant negative impact on your PC’s performance).

Transcoding videos is extremely resource intensive—our session pegged both our CPU’s cores at 100 percent utilization—so it’s best to do this when you won’t otherwise need to use your machine; consider doing it overnight or before you leave for work. Once you’ve gathered up a bunch of movies, launch Handbrake, click the Source button, browse to the folder containing your VIDEO_TS files, and select the first one in the directory. But instead of clicking the Start button to being transcoding, click the Add to Queue button. Repeat this step for each movie you want to transcode, make sure your presets are configured to your specifications, and click the Start button.

Now that you’ve transferred your movies from DVD to hard disk, you can transcodes them to other formats and resolutions for playing on various handheld digital media players; stream them from a media server or always-on PC to a gaming console, media center extender, or similar device in another room in your home; and so on. If you bought and paid for the movie, you should be able to do anything you want with it – short of sharing the file with other folks, of course. After all, you don’t want to become a real outlaw.