Download VideoByte BD-DVD Ripper for macOS

You pull a disc off the shelf, slide it into the drive, and your Mac just stares back. No video file, no playback, no way to drop that movie onto your tablet for tomorrow's flight. A disc is a physical object your modern devices can't read, and that gap is exactly where a ripper earns its keep.

VideoByte BD-DVD Ripper turns those shiny platters into playable files. Feed it a Blu-ray or DVD and it hands back an MP4, MKV, MOV, or a straight audio track like MP3 or AAC. With more than 300 output formats on deck, you can shape the result for a Samsung TV, an old iPod, or anything in between. The preset profiles for Apple, Samsung and Sony devices cut out the guesswork — pick a name, not a codec.

Commercial discs fight back with CSS, AACS, BD+, Cinavia and a handful of other protections. This app strips them away during the rip, so that store-bought disc acts like a plain data source. No extra tools, no late-night forum hunts.

It runs on Intel Macs and is listed for OS X 10.10 and later. If you still keep a disc library and want it freed into files, this is the sort of utility that bridges the gap between a shelf of plastic and a screen full of thumbnails.

Flip hardware acceleration first

Out of the box the app does a clean job, but three defaults are worth flipping before you rip anything serious.

Hardware acceleration. Open Preferences and make sure the Enable Hardware Acceleration box is ticked. With an Intel Mac and a supported NVIDIA, Intel or AMD chipset, it can halve the encode time for h.264 MP4s. The difference is less dramatic on DVDs, but on a full Blu-ray it's the gap between a coffee break and a lunch break.

Audio passthrough. By default the app re-encodes the main audio track to AAC. If you've got a surround setup or good headphones, switch the audio setting to Copy for the language track you want — you'll keep the original DTS or Dolby mix instead of a flattened stereo version.

Subtitle handling. Subtitles sit on the disc in two forms: image-based (PGS on Blu-ray, VOBSUB on DVD) and text-based. The app can burn them into the picture or leave them as a soft track you toggle on and off. If you plan to watch on a tablet, burning them in avoids surprise incompatibility later.

Drive not detected and other easy fixes

A couple of recurring hiccups show up in forum threads, and they're usually simple to fix.

• No disc found. Some external USB drives take a few seconds to spin up and negotiate. If the app doesn't see the disc right after you insert it, hit the refresh button next to the source selector. If it still doesn't appear, the disc might use a protection scheme that needs the app's latest key database — an update to 2.1.6 usually sorts that.
• Ripped file has no audio. Track selection matters. The app defaults to the first audio track it finds, which on some discs is a commentary or a descriptive track you didn't want. Before you hit Rip, open the audio dropdown and pick the main lossless or mix track.
• Output plays fine on the Mac but stutters on an old TV via USB. Some older Samsung and Sony panels choke on high-profile h.264 at bitrates above 15 Mbps. Drop the profile to Main rather than High in the video settings and cap the bitrate around 10 Mbps.
• Cinavia-protected audio glitches after 20 minutes. Cinavia lives in the audio stream and survives a standard rip. The app's Cinavia removal toggle under the audio settings is your lever here — turn it on for discs that carry it, which covers most Sony Pictures titles from the last decade.

a Saturday afternoon with a film collector

Picture someone with a shelf of imported Blu-rays — Japanese animation, region-locked European releases, a few out-of-print documentaries. Their Panasonic player died last month and they're not replacing it. Instead they want everything on a Plex server, playable on an Apple TV.

They load a region-B disc of a French silent film. The app strips the region lock without a prompt, and they select the MKV container so they can keep the original LPCM mono track and two subtitle streams — English and French — as soft tracks. They set the video to h.264 at 18 Mbps with hardware acceleration on. The rip takes about 25 minutes on a 2019 iMac.

They repeat this over the weekend, working through a stack of discs, letting the queue feature run overnight. By Sunday evening the Plex library has two dozen new entries, all with correct artwork pulled from the file names, all playing direct without transcoding. The discs go into sleeves in a cupboard, the shelf space becomes something else, and the collection is finally watchable without a dedicated player.

• OS X 10.10 or later
• Intel processor