Lossless Lord of the Rings Blu-ray rip on iPad 3

1 min read Misc

I have seen what 1080p from a Blu-ray looks like on iPad 3, and it is something to behold. The detail and the colors are just beautiful. Over the last few days I’ve worked through the technical issues of ripping one of my Blu-ray discs and converting it losslessly to a format the iPad can play. This doesn’t work for every Blu-ray because they are not all encoded on the disc in H.264. For example, Blade Runner: The Final Cut is encoded in VC1, and so I had to transcode that (but it still looks amazing). But the LOTR Extended trilogy uses H.264 and so you can have perfection. The steps were:

  1. On Windows, where my Blu-ray reader is, I ran makemkv and ripped the main movie plus all the audio tracks to disc. Each of the 6 discs in this trilogy takes between 20-35 GB of disk space. So, a lot!
  2. I copied each .mkv file to my Mac and ran MP4Tools, but just to convert the DTS audio track to AAC stereo format.
  3. I opened the .mkv and the AAC in Subler and “muxed” them together.

Joy!