How to: Back Up Blu-Ray Movies With a PS3

2009-04-08 23:53 - Tech

I've only done it a few times, but it's taken an amazingly large amount of effort to really figure out how to back up a Blu-Ray movie. Having the only Blu-Ray reader I own be off in a PS3 instead of my computer makes it even slightly more difficult. Even if only for my own reference, though, here's the set of steps I've recently used.

  1. Boot your favorite flavor of Linux on the PS3. I like Xubuntu.
  2. Rip the ISO of the disc somewhere that your Windows PC can read it. I "smbmount" a shared Windows directory, and do something like: 
    $ dd bs=128k if=/dev/cdrom of=~/u/bluray.iso

    Or, you can also make use of the wonderful pipe viewer tool to get a live progress meter of the ripping process. Try instead:

    $ pv /dev/scd0 > ~/u/bluray.iso
19.8GB 0:39:32 [8.27MB/s] [================>                  ] 51% ETA 0:36:37
    • This ISO file will be anywhere from 20 to 40 GB, and perhaps beyond.
    • This step can take about 90 minutes.
  3. Install the Toshiba UDF 2.5 Drivers for Windows XP. You'll probably need to use this trick to install, if you're not using a Toshiba made computer.
  4. Run AnyDVD HD. This is very not-free, but the only way I've found to decrypt the encrypted video content, which is necessary to get the video out for transcoding.
  5. Mount the ISO on the Windows PC, with Virtual CloneDrive ("freeware").
  6. Find the biggest file in BDMVSTREAM and open it with HandBrake (at least 0.9.3) and convert it to whatever you like! (This step can easily take 10 hours, or more, or less — depending on your settings, your hardware, and so on.)

Put right in one spot like that, it doesn't seem so hard anymore. But it did take me a while to patch together all those moving pieces.

Comments:

No comments!

Post a comment:

Username
Password
  If you do not have an account to log in to yet, register your own account. You will not enter any personal info and need not supply an email address.
Subject:
Comment:

You may use Markdown syntax in the comment, but no HTML. Hints:

If you are attempting to contact me, ask me a question, etc, please send me a message through the contact form rather than posting a comment here. Thank you. (If you post a comment anyway when it should be a message to me, I'll probably just delete your comment. I don't like clutter.)