Our friend Bill at the Digital Bits continues to deliver on some of the best and worst Blu-ray movie news — although we really wish he’d make his site linkable already — and this time it is the sad news that one of the most anticipated Blu-ray releases ever will be pushed to 2010. No word on exactly when The Lord of the Rings will make it to Blu-ray, but it seems pretty certain that it won’t be in the next four months.

I still do not understand the delay in getting Blu-ray movies to the marketplace.  LOTR Blu-ray would be a perfect Christmas present for geeks.  These movies will surely be some of the best selling Blu-ray movies ever.  Hopefully the quality is better than Gladiator though.

1. There main one is that you want to watch your movies on a computer.  Legally playing your blu-rays on a computer is a big pain.  You have to jump through a ton of hoops.  Ripping out the content protection is the first step in being able to actually watch YOUR OWN MOVIES.
2. Protect your movies from kids.
3. Avoid using the awful blu-ray software players like Cyberlink’s PowerDVD.  If you rip your movies, you can convert them to MKVs or another format.  There are tons of free players out there that support MKVs.  Why pay $80 for PowerDVD?

If you notice, I did not mention burning blu-ray movies.   In my opinion, writeable blu-ray discs are too expensive and not worth burning.

MakeMKV’s main selling point is that it is easy and makes fairly good conversions.  The one drawback I see in MakeMKV is that you can’t use lossless audio codecs like FLAC. The high fidelity of blu-ray discs will be lost in coversion to AC3. This may not be a big deal for some though, especially if you do not have a high-end receiver and speakers.

MakeMKV has some capability to remove the copy protection from your discs though I would plan on still using AnyDVD HD, which is by far and away the best ripper for Blu-rays.

However, Blu-ray has two advantages over downloadable content from the likes of iTunes and Amazon. First off, Blu-ray looks and sounds better. Maybe not by a lot but the difference is still there. This by itself would not be a big deal, which leads us to the second reason: Blu-ray is actually cheaper. Blu-ray movies can be bought on sale or used for under $15. Brand new releases run about $20. To download a movie from iTunes or Amazon costs $20. This brings us back to the better quality issue. Plus you can always resell a Blu-ray movie.

In terms of renting a movie, Netflix makes Blu-ray almost a no-brainer. Sure you can rent a movie from iTunes for $5, but why not pay $12 a month for Netflix and get all the Blu-rays you can watch in a month.

Next time someone is telling you that Blu-ray is dying, tell them two things: quality and price. Pretty simple.

ISO files can be loaded seamlessly with a virtual drive, like Virtual Drive from Slysoft. I must say it works seamlessly if you want to preserve