Still, it is only a matter of time until Blu-Ray (or the next-HD generation) becomes the standard. Users who already have a Blu-Ray player in their computer might want to transfer the movies to their computer system to mount or burn them again.

Enter Blu-Ray & DVD Decrypter. A free software suite that can be used to rip, mount and burn Blu-Ray DVDs.

The main interface provides easy access to rip, burn and emulate Blu-Ray DVDs. Blu-Ray DVDs can be ripped as ISO images or as m2ts files. Please note that a connected Blu-Ray player is required for the process. To burn Blu-Ray images a Blu-Ray recorder is required.

Images that reside on the hard drive can be mounted by the application which is basically a Blu-Ray player emulation on the computer system to be able to watch the movie if the right player is installed on the system.

The Blu-Ray & DVD Decrypter software is easy to use in most cases. It usually takes only a few clicks to rip and burn a Blu-Ray DVD with this software.

Update: The developer website and the development of the program have been discontinued. You can download the latest version of the program from Softpedia. A better solution is the actively developed Blu-Ray ripper Ripbot 264.

It was created as a reference tool and will display results seconds after execution. The results are divided into two categories. Basic Playback will check if the hardware of the computer is able to play Blu-Ray movies. The diagnostic tool will analyze the cpu, system memory, video card, disc drives but also the software players and video connection types available.

The detection is not overly accurate but should be sufficient on most occasions. It did detect 2 Gigabytes of computer memory on a system with 4 gigabytes installed. The Blu-Ray Disc Advisor will show if the items are Blu-Ray ready. A green icon means the hardware or software component can playback Blu-Ray movies while red means it is not capable of, yellow means an upgrade is required and brown means that the software cannot rate that item.

The second tab analyses the advanced Blu-Ray playback capabilities of the computer hardware. This includes special features that are included in some Blu-Ray movie titles like Internet interaction or picture-in-picture.

Items will be tested for dual-video decoding capabilities, network capabilities and player capabilities. It is possible to save the information in a log file and visit the Cyberlink website for additional information about items that are not Blu-Ray capable.

Blu-Ray Disc Ripper is the perfect complement for the Blu-Ray Region Code Remover that we introduced yesterday. The process would therefor start be started by running the Blu-Ray Disk Ripper to rip the Blu-Ray movie to the hard drive and start the Blu-Ray Region Code Remover afterwards to get rid of the region code protection if that is of concern.

The Blu-Ray Disk Ripper requires a unique volume key which the user has to supply. The software developer suggests to either search the Doom9 forum for the movie title or use the applications DumpVID and AACS Keys to find them. The program will check the key if it can be used to decrypt the Blu-Ray movie.

The software provides access to four actions.

• Copy the contents and decrypt the .m2ts files
• Copy the contents and do not decrypt the .m2ts files
• Decrypt BD-Live files related to the movie for a specific software player
• Sync modified dates between source and destination folder

The program is available at the Doom 9 forum. The current version can be downloaded at Sendspace directly.

There have not been many releases on Blu-Ray disks though except for movies. Blu-Ray disks can have a region protection which means that it can be that a movie won’t play on a Blu-Ray player if the disk and the player have been purchased in different regions.

The world is divided into three regions: Region A spans across most of Asia, region B includes Europe, Africa and Australia while region C includes North- and South-America and Japan.

Not all Blu-Ray movies are region encoded though. The decision is made by the motion picture studio releasing the movie.

The Blu-Ray Region Code Remover removes the region code of Blu-Ray disk rips on a computer’s hard drive so that these rips can be played regardless of the user’s region. It furthermore supports removing of region code from Blu-ray titles and Java-enabled titles. It can also remove Prohibited User Operations for a better user experience.

The software program requires Windows XP or Windows Vista and the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0.