Does it make sense to rip Blu Ray discs?

There is commercially available software out there called AnyDVD HD, which allows you to either rip to disk or rip to image (.iso file) of your movies, including Blu Ray. Not exactly cheap at around US $93, but it is extremely powerful software that defeats most every encryption. Of course, I would be remiss to mention that it is illegal in the United States to circumvent the encryption methods employed to protect against copying. The gray area is that you're generally allowed to copy things for personal use, but to circumvent the copyright protections is illegal. Funny eh?

Anyway, most Blu Ray discs contain 25GB of info. Even if your movies are only 20GB, that's still a lot of data to move around and store. If you bought a 2 terabyte drive for around $190, you would only be able to store 100 movies (assuming average 20 GB/movie). Of course, you could burn an .iso file to a BluRay disc. But do you really want to spend an unbelievable amount of time (23 minutes minimum each, to read and burn a movie, adding up to nearly an hour's worth of work) and $4 per blank disc, just to save a few bucks?

Consider that the trilogy Pirates of the Caribbean series costs $63.61 for 6 discs, or $10.60 a disk. By burning your own movies (assuming you rent from Netflix), the cost difference isn't that big when you add it all up. If you consider the amount of time (nearly 1 hour) it takes to process a single disk, I think - at least for the time being - that it's not even worth ripping and burning Blu Ray movies, legal or otherwise.