As far as I know, you can't change your TV or computer settings to make it work. Either your devices are HDCP compliant and it will work, or they're not and you can only play the Blu-ray disc on your laptop monitor. It is by design, so no manufacturer
or user can bypass HDCP.
Ripping is easy and very straightforward with the right tools. I got AnyDVD HD several years ago, the lifetime license was rather expensive but it has paid back since, and it's really the only piece of software I own for which I didn't have to report bugs.
It worked flawlessly so far, and I am a heavy user with over 1,000 movies and TV shows legally purchased and ripped. Every time I buy or rent a movie, I just insert the disc, let AnyDVD work its magic (it takes maybe a second for the DVD to be readable) and
right-click "Rip Video DVD to Harddisk" on the AnyDVD icon in the Notification Area. That's it.
This process rips the whole disc, about 5-7GB per movie, which includes the subtitles, audio tracks, bonus. Since I discard the discs in storage after ripping (I have far too many DVDs to be able to use them), I decided to rip everything without conversion,
not just the movie video file, so my ripped files are strictly identical to the disc and provide the same experience without needing to insert the disc ever. For DVDs, it adds about 50 cents in hard disk cost. Blu-ray discs work exactly the same except the
size is around 40GB and the additional storage cost is about $3.
I use 2 main folders for my rips, "Movies" and "TV shows", with one subfolder per main genre, such as "Action", "Animation", "Comedy", "Coming of age", "Family", etc. (for movies only, it's the the show name for TV shows) and inside each genre, one folder for
each movie. Using an appropriate folder structure, I find I often select a movie to play directly from Windows Explorer, right-clicking "Play with VLC" on the movie folder, rather than from VLC media player using the menu "Media|Open folder". I use Arcsoft
TMT5 mostly from within Windows Media Center or on its own. I don't separate DVD and BD from the folder structure, I just added the " (BR)" suffix to the folder names. If you want to see the movie posters in Windows Media Center, you also need to fetch the
dvdid XML files from the Internet.
So many reasons to get an integrated solution from Microsoft...