About a month ago I got my Bluray drive all setup in my Vista Media Center PC.  While I've had some issues with playback (about every 3rd movie locks up at some point) in general it's working very well and looks amazing.  The primary reason I bought a drive for my PC vs. getting a shiny new PS3 is so I can rip the disks that I own (that and I just couldn't be a single guy who owns a Wii, XBox360, and a PS3!).  With Bluray disks the only reason I want to rip them is to make playback easier/faster.  Each time I've watched a disk from the drive it will lock up at some point, when I rip them they rarely lock up.

When I got the drive I had not been following the ripping scene very closely so I figured this would be something I'd have to wait for.  I've been using AnyDVD and DVD Shrink for years to do all my DVD ripping, I'd heard that AnyDVD was releasing an HD version so I went to check it out.  I'm happy to say that not only have they released it I've happily been using it to rip my disks for a few weeks.

The issue with this is you need about 45GB per disk to store the rips (if you rip the entire disk).  From what I've seen the movies are usually around 15GB and all that extra space are the other audio tracks and the special features (of which I don't care about).  So I went looking for a replacement for DVD Shrink and was very pleased to find one, TSRemux.  TSRemux lets you pull out the audio and video streams you want and save them to a single .m2ts file (the new file type for Bluray).  You can then play this file back in Windows Media Player - no extra or funky software needed.  While I've been using PowerDVD to play back the disks I find that using Windows Media Player is much more reliable.

I purposely kept this fairly high level, if anyone reading this would like a step-by-step guide just leave me a comment and I'll write a post up for that too.