Lord of the blu-ray

I watched my first blu-ray yesterday, today I made my first blu-ray image. Everything went fine. My system:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2400 MHz CPU
Asus P5Q Deluxe motherboard
nVidia GeForce GTS 250 grapics card
Kingston 4 GB (2 x 2 DDR2) memory
LG BH10LS30 blu-ray writer
Samsung SyncMaster 2433BW monitor
Windows Vista Ultimate operating system

I googled blu ray rip, but in the end, my trusty DVD Decrypter did the job. Unfortately, it could only rip a region free blu-ray. When I tried ripping a blu-ray with all regions, i made a messed up file. Now I used AnyDVD, but as far as I understand, it can only rip folders, so not in *.ISO form. That gives me a chance to use Nero image writer, I hope Nero can write blu-rays.

Blu-ray is a bitch in that it requres the latest technology, but luckily I have a relatively new machine and even newer monitor. By the way, it's been said that blu-ray needs a DVI (digital) monitor with HDCP support, but somehow a VGA (analogue) showed the picture just fine. Well, burry, but okay.

And a friendly warning. Most blu-ray movies are on double layer which means up to 50 GB disc space for image file. The real downside is that double layer blu-ray blank discs are not even out yet. So, for now, you can rip, but not write. Oh well, writing is not so important, you can store your back-ups on an external hard drive. And even single layer discs are about $5 which is a little pricy.

Also, I have yet to try and connect my PC to TV, but if that goes well, no need for standalone blu-ray player.

Edit: Yes, Nero can write blu-rays, but as always, you have to have amount equal to data you are writing of disc space to cache. And somehow blu-ray image lags terribly, and from what I got from google, it does so with others, too. So I just rip the files onto hard disc, and watch the *.m2ts files with BSPlayer. Also, I stumbled on a secret. You can watch blu-rays from other region. Sure, blu-ray player software tells you there's a mismatch between drive region and disc region, but when you manually access the *.m2ts file, you can watch the movie.