But for now, just know the risks that you’re taking if you rip a DVD or Blu-ray to MKV to watch it on another device.Īs always, if you have any concerns, please contact a legal professional in whatever country you happen to live in. In my opinion, the laws have to catch up with the way the world actually works at some point in the near future. That being said, this is one of those areas where the common perception of morality doesn’t mesh with the laws on the books. In some cases, they’ve even managed to overturn changes, and reverting these rules back to their pre-digital strength.Īs of now, breaking the copyright protection on a DVD or Blu-ray is illegal in most countries – even if all you’re doing is watching it on another device (space shifting). But, the lobbyists for the major music and movie studios have resisted modernizing these regulations. They were both conceived to stop plagiarism and blatant copyright abuse. In broad terms, they talk about whether making a copy of something is ‘fair’ or whether it infringes on the copyright owner – normally the musician or studio. In the United States and UK, there are two similar concepts called Fair Use (US) and Fair Dealing (UK).

Most reasonable, intelligent people would think that once you buy a movie or CD then you have the right to watch it or listen to it however you want. Let’s get the legal questions out of the way first though. That’s all you’ll need to get started, other than the movies you want to rip to digital files. You’ll need either a PC or a Mac to run MakeMKV, but I’m a PC guy at heart.Īnd that’s it. The other thing to note is that everything in this tutorial is written from a PC perspective. That means it gives me 3 terabytes total space, but that space is being constantly backed up so that I never have to worry about losing my stuff because the drives go bad. Personally, I’ve got the consumer version of the Western Digital My Cloud which gives me 6 terabytes of space which I’ve got mirrored. I recommend some sort of Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. That’s a lot of space for one movie, so obviously, if you’re transferring your entire collection, you’re going to need a good sized hard drive or two. Blu-ray discs increase that by a factor of 10 to almost 50GB of data. A single DVD can hold up to 4.7GB of data.

Conclusion What you’ll need to get startedĪ couple things up front: DVD’s and Blu-rays take up a lot of storage space.

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