Pretty much every Mac since the early 2000s has shipped with a DVD drive, so these are easy to come by.
The external BD-R drive is a Buffalo MediaStation 6X USB 2.0 Portable Blu-Ray Writer. The Mac used for this tutorial is an 17' MacBook Pro (early–2011) with a 64-bit quad-core 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, OS X Mountain Lion, and a standard, built-in Superdrive. The encryption is where the line is drawn. This is why backing-up CDs is commonplace while backing-up DVDs and Blu-rays is frowned upon. Historically, this sort of thing fell under fair use law, but the DMCA (1998) makes it illegal to crack the encryption. Making a personal backup of movies you own is in a legal gray-area in the U.S. Because of this, I choose to exercise my fair-use right to format-shift my movies into something more convenient.
