Ripping Blu Ray movies

[AgentAK]

I have an extensive collection of Blu Ray 3D and regular movies. I would like to rip them to a HDD to eliminate having to search for and insert discs. My question is, will it degrade the video or audio quality?

[MrBlond]

Depends on the format, but if you do an MKV passthrough it won't degrade anything.

[AgentAK]

Had to Google it! Great, sounds good so far except for the time it's going to take me!
One more question; can I use an external HDD and plug it into my TV via USB?

[HibikiR]

The problem comes with storage. An extensive collection of Blu-rays will max out most drives with only a few movies and that's with all non-essential parts removed too.

Yes you can use an external hard drive to plug into your TV via USB, but the files on the hard drive will have to be ones in the list of supported formats that can usually be found in the user manual. MKVs, AVIs, and MP4s are probably all good. Raw Blu-ray data is probably a no-go.

[multigun]

MakeMKV does the job quite well. There is no loss in quality as its literally wrapping the video into a different container format. When you run MakeMKV, just choose the title with the largest size. That's usually the movie. All soundtracks (including alt language) and subtitles are preserved usually.

AnyDVD HD, which costs money, strips DRM and can also make perfect 1:1 .isos of your blu-rays. It even gives you the option of leaving in the DRM on the .iso so its literally a perfect copy (useful if you want to preserve certain features, usually the useless online features).

Both of these methods do not cause ANY loss in quality, but because of that, they result in HUGE files. You can plug into TV's that support MKVs. The Xbox One supports it now too. For other media players, you may need to transcode.

[AgentAK]

This is what it says my TV (Panasonic TC-P65ZT60) will support. So it looks like I'm good to go for plugging a HDD directly into a USB port on the TV?

AVCHD 3D/Progressive, SD-VIDEO, / MKV/MP4/M4v/FLV/3GPP/VRO/VOB/TS/PS, / MP3/AAC/FLAC/WAV, JPEG/MPO

[plan-b]

How extensive is "extensive"? A single layer Blu Ray is 25GB and a dual layer is 50GB. While they don't always max out the storage on a commercial disk, you're probably looking at an average of around 20GB per movie if you only rip the main title. I mean, it's still a good 50 movies or so on a terabyte drive and I've seen 4TB drives for decent prices at Costco. But you probably want a little room to grow your collection too.

I frequently rip movies to around 10GB at 1080p or 6-7GB at 720p if I want to save space and it's not a movie where image quality is super important to me. Unless you have some super high-end 4k TV, you might not even notice if you down sample a little bit. I'm a tinkerer so experimenting with stuff like this is kinda fun, but it does take a loooong time to do a single movie.

[pardonmynoob]

Mp4's at 1080 that look decent can result in close to 4gb files. I've got over 40 movies on a 1tb drive with plenty of space left hooked up via USB to a Samsung TV.

I'd recommend a dedicated htpc however. The decoding and ui will be better.