Jason Snell at Six Colors wrote up a great article on how he rips DVDs and Blu-rays.

This article came at the perfect time as I’ve been contemplating getting an external Blu-ray drive for my Mac Mini. Currently, I’ve been ripping some DVDs (using Handbrake) as I’ve been converting my gigantic collection to files that I can play back on my TV via Plex and my Roku. It takes about 20-30 minutes to rip a DVD on my Mini and the fans blow like crazy almost the entire time. That has been one of my biggest concerns with getting a Blu-ray drive. My concerns seem to be valid after reading this from Snell’s article:

Video files take a long time to encode. Even on my 5K iMac, this three-hour HD baseball game will take more than two hours to encode. Be patient, or let your encodes run overnight.

Now, I’m not ripping three-hour baseball games, but I do have some movies that go on three hours, or even longer. If my fans blow like crazy for 10-15 of the 30 minutes of a DVD rip, I can’t imagine what will happen if I try to rip a Blu-ray and encode the video for a couple of hours [footnote]Or longer as Snell was doing it on his new, suped up Retina iMac and I have a 2012 Mac Mini[/footnote]. Should I even bother or should I just re-purchase (or otherwise acquire) those movies in a stream-able format? I’ll have to browse around and see if there are Mini owners that are ripping Blu-rays without long term negative consequences to their Minis.