Most transparent way transfer blu rays + music onto mac mini?

NOW I'VE GOT MY NEW APPLE MAC MINI I NEED SOME ADVICE FROM YOU GUYS. WHAT'S THE MOST "TRANSPARENT SOUNDING" WAY TO COPY/TRANSFER ALL MY BLU RAY MOVIE DISCS & MUSIC CD'S ONTO THE MAC'S HARD DRIVE/MEMORY? TAKING INTO MIND IT DOESN'T HAVE A BUILT IN TRANSPORT MECHANISM, THE BEST SOLUTION I'VE COME UP WITH SO FAR IS FOR ME TO PURCHASE A REALLY GOOD EXTERNAL BLU RAY DISC DRIVE LIKE THE FOLLOWING http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/11/asus-12x-bw-12d1s-u-external-blu-ray-writer-worlds-fastest-u/ I'LL CONNECT IT UP VIA A USB 3.0 CONNECTION. OR IS THERE A BETTER SOLUTION OUT THERE TO ACHIEVE MY GOAL?

My question would be, how many Blu-ray movies do you intend to copy/burn? If I understand it correctly, a two hour hi-def (1080p) video requires ~ 25 gigs of space. That's about the same size as a single layer Blu-ray disc. My Mac mini only has a 500gig hard drive, so forgetting about overhead and other software on the drive, I could only put about 20 movies on it. So, one thing I would suggest is to not load them on your Mac, but load them on some external multi-terabyte drives. As far as getting the Blu-rays burned to them, I have not explored options, as I have no desire to do that. Good luck.

A quick google search turned this up...
http://www.lg.com/us/computer-products/network-storage/LG-network-attached-storage-N2B1DD2.jsp

slowGEEZR said:

My question would be, how many Blu-ray movies do you intend to copy/burn? If I understand it correctly, a two hour hi-def (1080p) video requires ~ 25 gigs of space. That's about the same size as a single layer Blu-ray disc. My Mac mini only has a 500gig hard drive, so forgetting about overhead and other software on the drive, I could only put about 20 movies on it. So, one thing I would suggest is to not load them on your Mac, but load them on some external multi-terabyte drives. As far as getting the Blu-rays burned to them, I have not explored options, as I have no desire to do that. Good luck.

Click to expand...

Good God! 25gb??!! That's enormous. I was under the impression that a Blu Ray disc would only take up 5GB so I think you may be mistaken. But thanks for the recommendation anyhow.

No mistake on the file size. DVD movies are up to ~4.7GB. Bluray discs can store up to 30GB IIRC. So a feature length film should be around 20-25GB give or take. I would agree that you should set up a NAS or external disk array (Thunderbolt) to store your media on rather than store it all on the Mac Mini's drive. I cannot help you with how to best rip the bluray movies. I have no experience with this. But I do know that the Mac Mini does not have a USB3.0 port on it. Good luck and let us know what you come up with.

Dan Osib said:

Good God! 25gb??!! That's enormous. I was under the impression that a Blu Ray disc would only take up 5GB so I think you may be mistaken.

Click to expand...

Not a mistake at all. Up to 5GB would fit on a regular DVD disc! It won't be anywhere near that small unless you compress the 5hit out of it - which begs the question - why would you bother with Blu-Ray in the first place.

Also agree with above post - a NAS is your best option when talking about files of this size. Especially if you want to live stream them. The Gigabit ethernet connection will provide better reliability than any consumer technology, and you can RAID the drives if you need more space than a single 1 or 2 TB drive (which you likely will)!

This way you can rip the discs on any computer and copy them across - you won't have to buy extra peripherals for your Mac Mini.

EDIT: Did you mean that you wanted to copy just the audio from the BluRay discs? In this case you may well find the data (if high res) is about 4-5 GB.

Blurays can be 50gb, actually. And a lot of movies use every bit of that 50gb.

amey01 said:

Not a mistake at all. Up to 5GB would fit on a regular DVD disc! It won't be anywhere near that small unless you compress the 5hit out of it - which begs the question - why would you bother with Blu-Ray in the first place.

Also agree with above post - a NAS is your best option when talking about files of this size. Especially if you want to live stream them. The Gigabit ethernet connection will provide better reliability than any consumer technology, and you can RAID the drives if you need more space than a single 1 or 2 TB drive (which you likely will)!

This way you can rip the discs on any computer and copy them across - you won't have to buy extra peripherals for your Mac Mini.

EDIT: Did you mean that you wanted to copy just the audio from the BluRay discs? In this case you may well find the data (if high res) is about 4-5 GB.

Click to expand...

No I just wanted to copy movies from Blu Ray discs. I also want to copy my CD's onto Mac Mini. I looked into the LG NAS server you guys are referring to and it said somewhere that it can't copy Blu Ray movies onto it's memory/hard drive. I'm confused.

To play back Blu-rays on a Mac you would first have to install Windows 7. OS X does not support the Blu-ray format. Under Windows, dbPoweramp is a fantastic piece of software to copy CDs onto a hard drive and tag them. A company called Slysoft makes software that can copy DVD, HD-DVD, and BR dics. Before you buy such software you should confirm that your intended use of it is legal in your jurisdiction. As for Windows playback software for Blu-rays, I like Cyberlink's PowerDVD best. Arcsoft's Total Theatre is also quite good.

There are ways to rip and re-code Blurays under OS X. AFAIK these processes are slow and may violate copyright laws.