(under GNU/Linux)

Noting this here because all the information I could find on the Interned told me “use MakeMKV for it”. And while MakeMKV seems like a fine product, it’s a bit harder to install, since it doesn’t seem to be packaged for Debian at least. I still gave Handbrake a try (since it is packaged for Debian) and lucky me, it turns out it does work with BlueRay disks.

Now, the following instructions are a bit fuzzy, since I used a bit of a round-about way to achieve this, but here is what I did:

• Installed VLC (just from the repositories, nothing fancy)
• Made sure that it could play BDs
  • It was giving the error “Missing AACS configuration file”. Luckily this askUbuntu answer pointed me in the right direction (and worked for Debian 13)
• Once VLC could play back the BDs, turns out Handbrake could also read them!

Since this is short and sweet, here is an extra tip, courtesy of /r/linuxquestions: how to update the chapter names after encoding? Turns out ffmpeg can do it (què surprise :)):

$ ffmpeg -i movie.mp4 -f ffmetadata movie.metadata.txt
# edit movie.metadata.txt
$ ffmpeg -i movie.mp4 -i movie.metadata.txt -c copy -map_chapters 1 movie_out.mp4

(image taken from bluecinetech.co.uk with permission under a CC license)