You can hardly follow the optical media storage industry’s progress. But you have to. Otherwise you will end up in 20th century while everybody else live in 21nd. This way Sony invented Blu-ray disc format and those BD now taking over DVD and making final shot on CDs head.

BD serves the same purposes DVD used to serve – it is storage. Storage that can be used to keep your data and media files. Blu ray disc capable to store up to 25Gb of data (single-layer) or 50Gb of data (dual-layer). But there is more than that here. Blu-ray Disc format is easily extendable (future-proof) it also includes support for multi-layer discs, which should allow the storage capacity to be increased to 100GB-200GB (25GB per layer) in the future simply by adding more layers to the discs.

Since BD much like CD before and DVD lately is a media storage the same question arises – every so often you need to rip or grab or whatever word you use the data off the disc for future use on your computer or even for future rewriting on the blank BD writeable media. How do you do it? Of course first of all you will need to get the drive (device) capable of doing it.

But more of it – you are going to need special software as well. It can be further complicated by the fact that sometimes these BD discs are copy-protected. Means you cannot do copy of the disc with the most of software rippers out there.

Protection is important technology to protect copyright of the authors and treated differently under different laws and in different countries. In some countries it is fully legal to do a backup copy of the product you paid money for, in others it is prohibited. You need to find out what is the case for your own territory yourself.

Supposing you found that you do have rights to make a backup copy of the content of your BD but that BD uses some protection mechanism and firmware software which comes with your writer is no good here. What software can be of help? Well it depends on what protection mechanism is used.

Most protected Blu-Ray discs use AACS protection which is advanced CSS encryption used in DVDs. What programs can be used to rip AACS protected discs? There are no many these days. I know only of two of them, namely: AnyDVD from SlySoft and BluRay & DVD Decrypter from Voodoo Media Software. AnyDVD is shareware and BluRay & DVD Decrypter is freeware.

I use the latter. Without going deep into technical aspects of grabbing the protected BDs, briefly the success of ripping of some particular disc depends on whether program has special key for this particular media.

BluRay & DVD Decrypter has two mechanisms for obtaining these keys. Program connects to the special database of the keys (which gets updated weekly so chances that your BD’s key is already there are good) or you can manually enter the key (which can be requested on their community forum).

Long story short – Blu-Ray is the technology that comes to replace DVD these days and although writers and discs are still somewhat expensive there’re lots of benefits to use the technology already. And software developers are offering products to support legitimate (I hope this is how you are going to use it) use of the technology.

Free Blu-Ray DVD Decrypter
http://bluraydvddecrypter.com