Is there a quick and straightforward way to do that these days? Last time I looked at ripping my collection it involved all sorts of different steps that I couldn't be arsed with.

Unfortunately Jim has always been the quickest, especially if it involves a re-encode

Same here. Hardly ever use my DVD player either, or disks for anything. Got some kids school concert DVDs that I've ripped and play on the Pi.

Same with the Wii. Got it chipped years ago and ripped (well, downloaded) my games so I can just run them off a HDD attached to it.

I admit to being intrigued by bluray for backups. Might do it for my next upgrade in ~2030.

I paid for Wondershare Video Converter which works for nearly everything I want to rip for my server. For the very occasional bluray that confuses it, MakeMKV produces a lossless .mkv version that Wondershare can then chew up. WVC is very fast and produces a really high quality HD mp4 in a couple of hours (on an i5 PC with 8GB tbh) as opposed to the overnight and all day with multiple steps that it took me a few years ago.

If you're OK with .mkv then MakeMKV is fine on its own. Technically it's pay-for software, but it's free while in beta (which it has been forever) and the developers are happy to share the beta key here. It strips region and drm as part of its process (and actually objects if you use something like AnyDVD as well). I only bother with Wondershare because not all my devices handle .mkv, and I've already paid for it, and it's quick and easy. Oh, also, MakeMKV's key expires every month but they post a new one so you can reregister it.

And obviously you need an optical drive that can read blurays.

Yeah but sometimes struggle to find decent quality stuff on pirate bay :(

I'll take a look at MakeMKV (think everything I have plays mkv), need a USB3 blue ray drive though...

Format Factory is pretty good & free.

My beef with MKV is that a significant number of media players don't play it.

Kodi on a raspberry pi plays it fine - what else do you need?

^This.

I used a free version of Aiseesoft's blu-ray ripper that I got via giveawayoftheday (that kind of software tends to crop up every few months), and it worked fine, though it struggled with copy protection on some new blu-rays. I found another ripper called somethingorother that got around all that, it had the same UI albeit in a different colour, but was from another company. I'll dig out the name for you tonight.

Grand. I might start ripping my dvd/bluray collection in the near future.

If you want to seed it probably have a bit-HDTV invite

It's called 4Videosoft blu-ray ripper.

That's their main page, it's got a trial version and the full fat version retails at $39, but I'm sure a call to Jim might see you find it cheaper.

I'm a leacher :C

Ta - looks like it would work. 

I'm going to come back to this thread in a few months when I've got the storage space sorted to store all the rips centrally. 

Kodi's a bit poo though, innit?

In what way? Works well for me!

I dunno what it's like on a Pi but I use it for all my TV/video needs on a Mac Mini, got pretty much no complaints for serving content off my network at least.

On a Pi2 or Pi3 it's great.

I use it on an HP Chromebox and on an S905 based box.