When building a media-center Mac, everyone has his optimal components and different set of requirements. Now that the new Mac Mini sports the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M as its integrated graphics chip, it is finally a true contender for the home media center space. After building up a Mac mini HTPC, most folks would download music, pictures, games, music and most important of all, their movie collections to the Mac Mini HTPC immediately. If you’re HD movie lover and wish to add Blu-ray movies to the newly built Mac HTPC, Pavtube Blu-Ray Ripper for Mac and PLEX are good combination. Pavtube Blu-Ray Ripper for Mac copies protected Blu-ray movie to your Mac HTPC and PLEX plays high-definition 1080p M2TS files from Blu-ray structure. In that way you play Blu-ray movie on Mac HTPC without quality loss. This following guide tells how to copy/ rip Blu-ray and DVD movies to Mac Mini HTPC with Pavtube Blu-Ray Ripper for Mac.

Required hardware: Mac Mini with an external BD drive; source DVDs and Blu-ray Discs.

Required software: Pavtube Blu-Ray Ripper for Mac

(The software is able to back up Blu-ray movies and commercial DVDs for Mac HTPC Media Center without quality loss or compress the BD and DVD movies to MOV, MP4, MKV, M4V, etc in perfect sync. Download from here a trial version of Pavtube Blu-Ray Ripper for Mac )

Enrich your Mac Mini HTPC Media Library: rip DVD and Blu-ray movies to PLEX:

Step 1. Load movies (videos) to the Blu-ray/DVD to Mac HTPC Converter software.

Pavtube Blu-ray Ripper enables you to rip protected blu-ray discs and DVD movie into versatile popular video and audio formats. With the new release of v3.6, a new utility has been added to make users copy the whole disc in shortest time. Now with ‘Full Disk Copy’ option of Blu-ray Ripper, users are able to make a successful and full copy of protected blu-ray movie. The entire disc could be back up to your hard drive within an hour. Now let’s see how to copy the entire Blu-ray disc to PC.

Before start please make sure you have a BD drive and the blu-ray disc is not damaged. Put the disc into blu-ray disc drive. Get trail version of Pavtube Blu-ray ripper. Note that the trial version of blu-ray ripper copies blu-ray and DVD movie for only three times and have Pavtube logo on the screen.

Getting started
1. Load Blu-ray movie to Pavtube Blu-Ray Ripper.
Run Blu-Ray Ripper and you will see the below interface. The ripper allows you to import blu-ray movie from both disc and folder. For Blu-ray disc, click ‘BD/DVD ROM’; for Blu-ray Folder, please click ‘BD/DVD Folder’ and browse to the Blu-ray directory.

By default the files are listed in Title Mode, all the chapters are in numerical sequence for you to check individually. For checking the subordinate chapters of certain sequence, please click its plus sign. Generally, ‘Title001’ contains the main movie, and other Titles are commentary, menus, titles and ads. By default all the Titles are selected for editing and ripping.

A fast way to select the main movie is, right-click in file list field and choose ‘Uncheck All’ in shortcut menu and then check the main movie (longest m2ts file). To check all the chapters,simply choose ‘Check Subchapters’.

2. Preview the blu-ray clips and take snapshots
Double-click on a file to preview when you would like to preview it. You can take snapshots when previewing the movie. Simply click ‘Snapshoot’ button. To locate the thumbnails, please click ‘Open folder’ button. To set image format, location and size of thumbnails, please click ‘Option’ menu.

3. Copy the entire blu-ray structure and contents to PC
To make a quick and full copy of the Blu-ray movie, you can click ‘Full Disk Copy’ button. In this way all contents of the Blu-ray disc will be copied to your hard drive, including the menus, titles, ads, etc. Full Disk Copy aims to help users to backup the whole contents of a blu-ray disc or standard DVD in the easiest and fastest way. The backup costs much less time than ripping movie to other format. With the Blu-ray and DVD structure, you do not have to create new menu when burning the blu-ray movie to blank blu-ray disc for backup.

4. Play m2ts files on PC.
After the copy completed, you may click ‘Open’ button to locate the Blu-ray directory. Open BDMV-> STREAM folder and you will find all the m2ts movie clips. For playing the m2ts files, you may use VLC player or KMPlayer.

Learn more:  Make full copy of blu-ray disc in fastest and easiest way