Author: Mark Boszko

In the course of transferring film (24, or for our purposes, 23.976fps) to NTSC (29.97fps or 59.94 interlaced fields per second), we get what’s referred to as 3:2 Pulldown. What happens is that we get three fields from one frame of the film, two fields from the next, and repeat this forever. So, for frames…

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This is a little thing, but as it took me a while to hit on the best combination for my needs, I thought it might be useful to others. Of course, make sure that ripping the movies that you own on Blu-ray for your own personal use is actually legal in your jurisdiction.

That assumed, you’re going to need a Blu-ray drive. No Mac currently ships with one (Steve Jobs’ “bag of hurt” statement continues to hold sway), so you’ll have to add it yourself. I have an internal drive that I put in the second optical bay of my Mac Pro, but if you have a more compact system, my understanding is that there are external drives that will work just as well (though I don’t have personal experience with those).

I use MakeMKV to rip the Blu-ray movie to a Matroska Video File. Just pop the disc in the drive and once it loads, click the “Open Blu-ray Disc” button.

It will scan the disc for all of the available tracks, and present them to you. The first thing I usually do it right-click on one of the checkboxes and choose “Unselect all”, since usually I only want one or two tracks, at most. You can usually guess which track is the main movie by it being the largest file size (here, 31.5 GB) with a decent number of chapters.

Here’s my solution:

The submission form is now closed. If you want to try to sneak in a last-minute photo, hit me up on Twitter, but I’ll probably be done on 26 Feb.