Blu-ray ripping software?

[SMURG]

I always used to use MakeMKV to rip blu-rays and then encode them with Handbrake, but since MakeMKV came out of Beta I've been after a new solution since frankly I'm not willing to pay £50 for it. £20 would be fine but 50 just isn't worth it for how much I use it. Is there any other software out there with similar functionality which is cheaper, or better yet free? I don't mind if it rips straight to .mp4/.m4v or not, I just need it to make a file I can work with really. So far I haven't had much luck finding any.

SOLVED - thanks to @Captain Chaos

[Firearm2112]

http://www.hdmediaconverter.com/top-5-blu-ray-rippers-2013/

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

Oh, so the time of the free beta keys is over then?  Oh well, time to buy a license then. 

 

Perhaps a dumb question, but why encode the files?  Never had a reason to do any editing to anything that MakeMKV ripped, the videos always played just fine.  Is it to save disk space? 

[SMURG]

Oh, so the time of the free beta keys is over then?  Oh well, time to buy a license then. 

 

Perhaps a dumb question, but why encode the files?  Never had a reason to do any editing to anything that MakeMKV ripped, the videos always played just fine.  Is it to save disk space? 

Sadly, yes

As for why I encode the files, one reason is that the 30GB or whatever files are just unnecessarily large - particularly with the advent of h.265 support you can drastically reduce the file size without having much impact on the video quality. It does also improve compatibility though if I need to play it through something which supports .mp4 but not .mkv - the former is much more universal than the latter. Unfortunately not many players support h.265 decoding yet though so that kind of nullifies the point for the time being.

I actually have loads of disk space available but I encode them anyway in the interest of efficiency - I know I will eventually use all the TBs I have and will need to buy more, but encoding each file means the space I have will last longer and also means I don't have to encode them all at once - which given how time-consuming the encodes can be would be inconvenient.

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

50 EUR is a lot indeed.  Then again I do plan on ripping many more movies and like the idea of using software that I'm familiar with and that works flawlessly, so I'll probably end up buying a license.

 

No shortage of space here (6.5 of 12TB used on the NAS) and the ever-decreasing cost of ever-bigger HDDs means that when I'll need the extra space It'll be relatively cheap to upgrade.  By then the HDDs will also have exceeded their life expectancy anyway. 

[SMURG]

http://www.hdmediaconverter.com/top-5-blu-ray-rippers-2013/

I did come across that list before but I've never heard anyone with any experience using them who could compare them to MakeMKV. I tried some of them in demo capacity (where one exists) but getting them to actually rip a blu-ray disk properly was sometimes a challenge and other times they insist on encoding the output with minimal control when it comes to settings (which inevitably results in a sub-optimal output which takes hours to produce). Where MakeMKV was great was that it performed only minimal compression (if any) and therefore generated an output extremely quickly.

Acrock seems promising but it does insist on encoding the output slowly rather than just giving me a huge raw file to do with as I please, and it's only £5 cheaper than MakeMKV so I might as well bite the bullet and buy MakeMKV rather than get Acrock.

[SMURG]

50 EUR is a lot indeed.  Then again I do plan on ripping many more movies and like the idea of using software that I'm familiar with and that works flawlessly, so I'll probably end up buying a license.

 

No shortage of space here (6.5 of 12TB used on the NAS) and the ever-decreasing cost of ever-bigger HDDs means that when I'll need the extra space It'll be relatively cheap to upgrade.  By then the HDDs will also have exceeded their life expectancy anyway. 

Sure, but since capacity gets cheaper all the time the longer you can keep the drives you have the cheaper a TB of capacity is going to be when you need to buy more. Perhaps more importantly, data density is improving all the time so you get more capacity per SATA port/drive rack.

[SMURG]

Thanks to @Captain Chaos for providing a workaround

[rockking1379]

makemkv has a 30 day trial to the blu ray ripping portion of the program. a license for it is like 55 bucks