Convert BluRay Disks to AppleTV

[supanatral]

If I want to convert DVD's to mp4 format, i usually use handbrake, but what would I use for BluRay Disks?

[JeffCGD]

First you will need a BluRay disc drive for your mac to even read the BluRay disc (you can get these, but they aren't cheap). The you will need software to crack the encryption (much tougher than DVD encryption, but it has also been done). Then you will need software to transcode the BluRay data to MP4 or compatible format. I don't think there is anything like handbrake available to do that yet, however – unless handbrake can read whatever is extracted from the BluRay disc at present.

[CJ MAC OSX IPOD]

Jeasus. Good question :P

[Mikuro]

As far as I know Blu-Ray movies use only three video codecs — MPEG2, H.264 and WVM3 (called something else, but I forget what) — all of which are reasonably well supported in Mac video converters.

So converting the video should be the easy part. The hard part is decrypting it and copying it to your HD. I'm not aware of any apps that do this in OS X. I've heard of such apps for Linux, though.

Depending on where you live, this may or may not be legal.

[supanatral]

Well, where I am, it is legal. actually-i have the files on my computer. all 30 gigs of it. Handbrake doesn't work though

[Thank The Cheese]

you can't do it yet, at least not in the same way you can with DVDs. Your best bet is to use the analogue hole. If you have something that can get HD signals into your computer, like an EyeTV or some kind of AV receiver box, you might be able to do it that way.

for example, buy a standalone BluRay player and start playing the movie, then go from HDMI or Component out from the player, to an HDMI or component input on the AV box. Then go from the AV box to your Mac, which is capturing and recording the program. You're going to lose quality, but I think it's the only way at this point in time.

They have tried to plug the analogue hole too by encrypting the HDMI connection, but as far as I know they haven't started enforcing that, mostly because a great number of HDTVs don't yet support the HDCP spec.

[Mikuro]

Have you tried playing the files on your HD with VLC and MPlayer? If they're not still encrypted, I think they ought to play. (And if VLC doesn't work, you can try one of the prerelease nightly builds.)

If you can play it in VLC, you should be able to convert it with VLC. If you can play it in MPlayer, you should be able to convert it with the command-like mencoder or with ffmpegX.