After more searching and digging, I found ripping dvds to my hard drive too difficult and time consuming.
Instead, I would consider using https://yts.re/ and http://www.bittorrent.com/ to find torrents and download them.
I think you really, really should get a vpn like Astrill. Im assuming you don't, but if you already do, then don't worry too much since the people who will be reading your blog will almost always be people who don't live on China. Just use whatever blog site you prefer, I'd say.