‘VLC Media Player’ is a free media player developed by VideoLAN. It can play a variety of video files, as well as unencrypted DVDs and BDs. Detailed functions can be found at VLC’s official site. But ‘VLC Media Player’ can’t play Blu-ray DVD with AACS protection. VLC originally did not support Blu-ray disc playback. From the Input Media part on official website, you can see that Blu-ray is not covered. Since 2010, the launch of a project called libbluray made it possible to play Blu-ray with VLC.

You must have noticed that you can’t always use copy and paste for your DVD/CD/Blu-Ray disk drives. Have you wondered how you can take all the contents like music, songs, and videos and store it in your computer for backup? VLC can do that. It can easily rip a DVD, Blu-Ray, Audio CD and even those Video CDs (SVCD or VCD). With the help of VLC Media Player, you can copy the contents of a Blu-Ray or DVD and even an Audio CD. The contents of a disk can be saved to your laptop or desktop.

These circular disks aren’t popular like they used to be but they are still in use. If your laptop has one of those drives and you have old music CDs, movie Blu-Rays, DVD or VCD lying around, back them up to your computer safely. It’s like downloading online video but from CDs and DVDs instead. VLC will rip and extract them in a modern and popular digital format like MP3, MP4 (H.264). You can store these MP3 and MP4 files forever in your PC or Mac as a backup.

So, here are the detailed steps to rip a DVD, Blu-Ray, Audio CD or SVCD/VCD and save them to your computer (desktop or laptop) using VLC Media Player:

First, insert your DVD, CD, Blu-Ray Disc, Audio CD or Video CD to the disk drive in your laptop, PC or Mac

• Open VLC and access Media > Convert/Save [CTRL + R].
  
• Click on the Disc
• Select a disc type: DVD, Blu-ray, Audio CD or SVCD/VCD.
• Check on ☑ No disc menus.
• Select your disc from the drop-down or Browse to choose it.
  
• Click on Convert/Save.
• Next, choose a Profile: (a) Video – H.264 + MP3 (MP4) works great for videos and (b) Audio – MP3 works great for ripping audio CDs.
• Click Browse and choose a Destination file.
  
• Hit Start to begin the Audio/Video ripping.

The progress bar in VLC’s player interface will show you how much of the ripping and copying is done. If the progress bar doesn’t move, click on the Play button. You can, of course, pause it in the middle but it isn’t recommended. Once the process completes, browse to the destination folder and get all the ripped MP3s (Audio) or MP4s (Video + Audio) files. You can now copy them to any location—hard drive on your system, external storage, and cloud locations. You can also convert them into different formats using VLC. They will be saved forever and won’t get lost because the circular disc has been damaged or scratched.

Some Blu-Ray ISOs cause VLC to get stuck when loading the menu. Typically what happens is that VLC loads the disc/ISO/folder plays the intro animation or movie studio logo and then gets stuck before it can display the full BDJava menu.
In at least one case there should be an intermediate screen allowing the user to select which language the Blu-Ray should use.
Until now the only option has been to disable use of Blu-Ray menus completely. This itself is poorly designed. For normal DVDs there is a simple tick-box in the Open Disc dialog but no such option for Blu-Rays. For Blu-Rays you instead have to do the following -
Go to Preferences
Click Show All
Expand Access Modules

Mac Blu Ray Player Pro

Select Blu-ray
Untick Blu-ray menus
Click Save
and then open the Blu-Ray for playback
However I did discover after upgrading to VLC 3.0.10 although that may have been nothing to do with it that if/when this problem occurs you press the Return key on the Mac this does seem to cause it to continue to the next stage i.e. the full Blu-Ray menu. A guess might be that this is selecting whatever default choice the non-displayed intermediary screen might be showing.

Vlc Player Blu Ray Playback

I also more recently have been able to try newer alternative Mac Blu-Ray player software and seen a similar issue with the same titles of them getting stuck at the same point. Again as a guess these maybe using the same open source library for processing Blu-Ray menus. Unfortunately the trick of pressing return did not work for them.
So, at least for VLC we may now have a workaround but clearly it would be better if the relevant Blu-Ray library was 'fixed' so as not to get stuck in the first place.
On a related topic the (poor) documentation here https://wiki.videolan.org/QtHotkeys/ says that Shift-M would bring up the disc menu. On a Mac Shift-M etc. do not work and it seems Control-M is the Mac equivalent. I did also find some options caused VLC to crash. As one would expect and hope in general the same disc navigation keys apply to playing Blu-Rays as well. However Blu-Rays do also have another type of menu which can be brought up and displayed on top of the still playing movie. This seems to be usually triggered by using the up and down arrow keys. However for the original Blade Runner Blu-Ray it seems instead to use the Return key to trigger its display. For some discs I also noticed that Control-M took you to the beginning of a disc i.e. Title meaning you had to wait for it to play through to the menu possibly via numerous trailers. It seems to vary from disc to disc.