Rip Blu-ray to MP4 on Mac OS X Freely

There may be a lot of Blu-ray ripping software to help to crack the Blu-ray protection and re-encode into a common video formats like MP4, etc. But most of them are paid tools, and you must pay to use the Blu-ray decryption feature. Even you can find some free tool like Aurora Blu-ray Copy; you will find the Blu-ray ripping feature has been emasculated. But we can still find some complicated and partially free methods. In this article, I want to introduce it to you.

What we used include three tools MakeMKV, Handbrake, VLC Media Player. Starting with version 1.8.5, MakeMKV comes with libmmbd library, which is licensed under open-source LGPL license. This library provides a simple API that any application can use to decrypt M2TS/SSIF files from a Blu-ray disc. It launches a MakeMKV instance in background and communicates with MakeMKV in order to get decryption keys - so working MakeMKV is required for the library to function.

This libmmbd library emulates libaacs/libbdplus libraries - below are instructions how to setup libmmbd for libaacs/libbdplus emulation. This is one-time setup per user account and you don’t need to set it again later. Only one pity thing you should note is that Blu-ray ripping feature of MakeMKV is only free during its beta(often 30 days).

Open terminal, end execute following commands.

cd ~
mkdir -p ~/lib
ln -s /Applications/MakeMKV.app/Contents/lib/libmmbd.dylib ~/lib/libaacs.dylib
ln -s /Applications/MakeMKV.app/Contents/lib/libmmbd.dylib ~/lib/libbdplus.dylib

So that you know what you're asking your computer to do, the 'cd' command just changes your directory (with ~ meaning "home"), the 'mkdir' command just creates a new folder and the 'ln -s' command creates a symlink (similar to a shortcut) to make these libraries visible in a spot that OS X would look.

You're done. From now on VLC or Handbrake will automatically use MakeMKV for blu-ray decryption. From then on you can play Blu-ray disc with VLC directly as well as use Handbrake to rip and convert Blu-ray to Apple compatible MP4 format(Apple TV, iPad, iPhone, etc.)