How do I Back up and Burn a Blu-ray with Mac?

Before starting I’d like to make it clear what it concerns in this article. Yeah we are talking about burning a Blu-ray Disc on Mac OS, not with HD video contents from your AVCHD camcorder recording, TiVo shows or FCP project, but from a commercial Blu-ray Disc-- in another word, making disc-to-disc copy from encrypted Blu-ray purchases.

Only because Apple refused to add Blu-ray Disc Drive to Mac does not mean Blu-ray entertainment on Mac become impossible. In fact you can easily rip a Blu-ray to Mac HDD with the help of a Mac-compatible BD drive and Blu-ray Ripper. And there’re plenty of them for your choice. Pavtube Blu-ray Ripper for Mac is one of the best choices if you’d like to back up Blu-ray to iTunes/Quick Time for playback or burn a disc copy for safety. It does not come with authoring/burning feature though- all it does is cracking the BD protections and getting the Blu-ray media contents down to your Mac HDD, and converting the movie to specified formats (TS, MKV, AVI, VOB, MPG, etc) if necessary. In order to burn a playable Blu-ray Disc you’ll also need Rixio Toast Titanium, the best-known DVD/BD authoring toolkit on Mac.

The guide below directs you how to rip/back up a Blu-ray movie to Mac for burning.

Step 1. Hook up an external Blu-ray Disc drive with your Mac, place Blu-ray Disc into the drive. Run Pavtube Blu-ray Ripper software, click the “Blu-ray” icon to import movie from protected Blu-ray disc. Keep your Mac networked to have the software crack Blu-ray copy-protections.

Step 2. Click on “Format” to select output format from the pull down menu. For burning Blu-ray with Toast Titanium you’re suggested to choose “HD Video->> MPEG-TS HD Video (*.ts)” format.

Step 3. Set titles, audio language and subtitles. You can preview the titles and tick off unwanted ones. And the app only allows you to set one audio language and subtitles.

Step 4. Click the big “Convert” button to start converting Blu-ray to TS file. When the Blu-ray is cracked and converted into 1080p TS file, it can be processed just like any other HD media contents. Click here for detailed instructions on burning HD movies to Blu-ray Disc with Toast Titanium 10.

And there’s one thing to mention about Pavtube Blu-ray Ripper – the app uses compressive encoding method when converts Blu-ray to TS format, this brings degradation of video quality and reduction in file size- meaning it’s an optional way burning a BD-50 to BD-25. To improve video quality, you can set higher bitrate before conversion starts, for instance, click “Settings” and set video bitrate to 180000kbps.

One more question, is there any way to rip Blu-ray to Mac HDD with everything unchanged? Well, the Pavtube Mac Blu-ray Ripper also gets a “Full Disc Copy” feature for you to try out, that copying menus, features, playlist and all what on the Blu-ray Disc to Mac HDD.

Tags : blu-ray backup, burn blu-ray, mac blu-ray ripper, mac blu-ray burner