MacOS – the best/fastest way to rip and convert a Blu-ray Disc on an iMac

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I've recently switched (back) from Windows 10 to macOS running on an iMac 27-inch Retina late 2015. While I still used my Windows 10 laptop, I used a program called DVDFab to rip my collection of Blu-ray movies into a format suitable for Plex and Emby. The process took about 45 minutes per disc and used the GPU part of the Intel i7 processor in my laptop to speed things up.

Now that I am on a Mac, I can't seem to find a program (or set of programs) that allows me to rip Blu-ray movies with the same, or better, speed. Most articles seem to suggest a combination of MakeMKV for ripping and Handbrake for converting. However, this takes about 45 minutes for ripping and 2 hours for converting, as none of these programs seems to make use of GPU acceleration. I have also downloaded a few commercial packages to see if they make use of acceleration, but I have yet to find a program that both can read directly from a Blue-ray disc and do the transcoding to give me a suitably small mp4 file.

Can you recommend a solution other than sticking with Windows 10 and DVDFab?

Best Answer

So I found a solution, just not a short or elegant one:

  • Install bootcamp on the iMac
  • Install Windows 10
  • Install dvdfab.

At first dvdfab did not want to work with the GPU (AMD Radeon). Turns out that the graphic drivers bundled with bootcamp were too old, but there is no update from Apple. http://bootcampdrivers.com has newer driver packages for the mac / AMD GPU.

I had to follow a long set of instructions to install it, including booting the Windows machine into Safe mode. In the end, everything works as it should, and Blu-ray conversion time is now around 40 minutes!

As converting Blu-ray movies is not something I do everyday, I can live with this solution.