Borrowing ideas from this lifehacker post ‘Five Best DVD Ripping Tools’, there’s a good possibility that MakeMKV and Handbrake installed on a Mac Mini running Mavericks is able to rip a DVD that’s protected by digital rights management. Before I go on, I see eyebrows raising. You’re wondering if this is just plain illegal, what lifehacker proposes. The answer is, probably. There’s a lot of DVD content out there that’s in the public domain, but when it comes to media that’s ‘protected’ by DRM (Digital Rights Management), then you probably just violated “Title I of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 17 U.S.C. 1201 that prohibits circumvention of DRM”. There’s really no gray area in the law, but some feel there’s some wiggle room when you purchase and own a DVD. Not so. Check out this lifehacker article if you’re interested in a well thought out response to the legality question.
OK, now that we’re clear about the legal implications, here’s the low-down on the two free applications one might be inclined to run on a Mavericks system to rip DRM-protected DVDs.
MakeMKV is a one-click solution to convert video that you own into free and patents-unencumbered format that can be played everywhere. MakeMKV is a format converter, otherwise called a “transcoder”. It converts the video clips from a proprietary (and usually encrypted) disc into a set of MKV files, preserving most information and not changing it in any way. The MKV format can store multiple video/audio tracks with all meta-information and preserve chapters. There are many players that can play MKV files on most platforms, and there are tools to convert MKV files to many formats, including DVD and Blu-ray discs.
Using MakeMKV: Insert DVD, run MakeMKV, select the optical drive containing the DVD, select ‘Open DVD disk’ – that’s it. After a few minutes the DVD’s contents will be analyzed, after which you’ll need to select ‘Make MKV’ (upper right corner) to create the MKV file(s) that will be stored locally on your system.
HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs.
o Convert video from nearly any format
o Free and Open Source
o Multi-Platform (Windows, Mac and Linux)
Using Handbrake: Although HandBrake has many possible settings as are described in various YouTube videos on the subject, you can probably use many of the default settings for successful encoding of the files output from MakeMKV into an .mp4 file with H.264 encoding. To use it, launch HandBrake, select a source file and titles/chapters that were output by MakeMKV (probably located in the ‘Movies’ folder on the Mac), select an output file/location and encoding settings (you’ll usually use the default settings), then select ‘Start’. Encoding with handbrake can take quite a while, so let it run for an hour or so. When it’s done, you’ll have an .MP4* file that can be played on just about anything.
*Note: The only setting you might need to change from the defaults in HandBrake is to select .MP4 versus .M4V under preferences. You should only need to do this once when you first run HandBrake.
