How to Rip DVDs on Mac
Copying your personal movie collection to your Mac is a great way to protect against scratched and lost discs. This is made difficult, however, by copy protection placed on the discs to prevent piracy. But that doesn’t stop us, here’s how to circumvent the copy protection checks with two simple tools: MakeMKV & HandBrake.
Because most commercial DVD or Blu-Rays have copy protection built-in, you will need a third-party program to remove the copy protection. Do note that rthe copy protection from DVDs that you do not own is illegal in most countries.
Between the two options, the best way to preserve the original pq/aq is by doing 1:1 rip using makeMKV. On the other hand, Handbrake has the ability to transcode it using compression to a smaller file size, while generally preserving image quality still. Time to do the rip takes significantly longer though.
For MakMKV:
Insert the DVD you wish to copy. Run MakeMKV. Select your DVD drive from the Source pulldown menu in MakeMKV.
Select the content you want to copy. DVDs are often broken down into several “titles”. These titles include things like previews, menus, bonus features, and the actual movie. Uncheck the boxes for any content that you don’t wish to copy.
Titles less than 2 minutes will be automatically unselected. This will remove most previews from your finished rip.
Select your output folder. This is where the finished file will appear after it is done being ripped.
Rip the DVD. Once you have selected all of the settings that you want, click the Make MKV button. This will begin the ripping process. The time that it takes is dependent on the speed of your DVD drive. The average time to rip a DVD movie is about 15-30 minutes.
Play the video. MakeMKV creates an MKV file that contains all of the video and audio information. This file will be as large as the DVD was. MKV files do not work in iTunes or Windows Media Player, but can be played using the free VLC Player.
MKV files are lossless files. This means that the image and audio quality is retained from the original source.
It is similar for Handbrake, but with more features to convert video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. So if you are looking to make a smaller file size specific for your iPhone / iPad etc; then the tool will come in handy.
Insert the DVD to “rip” in your Mac and start the program. If you get a notice that HandBrake is an application downloaded from the Internet and therefore potentially dangerous, click the Open button to confirm the start of the software.
At this point you will be asked to choose the DVD to “rip”. Select then the DVD drive of the Mac from the sidebar of the Finder, open the folder VIDEO TS that is in it and double click on the file VIDEO_TS.BUP to indicate to the program the DVD to “rip”. If you are prompted to download additional plugins needed to decode the disc, accept and wait for the download to finish.
Once you recognize the contents of the disk, you can rip a DVD with Mac by simply selecting the title with longer duration, ie the film, from the drop-down menu Title (though it should already be selected automatically), the file format in which want to convert the DVD from menu Format (MP4 or MKV) and clicking on the green Start button located in the upper left corner.