You can buy an external one that connects over USB, or an internal one for your desktop-either is fine. If you want to rip 4K UHD Blu-rays, however, your choices are more limited.

Instead, you will want a regular Blu-ray drive that is considered '4K friendly.' Due to their enhanced copy protection, 4K UHD Blu-rays can't be ripped on most 4K Blu-ray drives. If you already have a Blu-ray drive, you can poke around the MakeMKV forums to see if it's usable for 4K Blu-rays, or you can buy one of their recommended drives. You may have to flash custom firmware or roll back to an older firmware version in order to read those 4K discs. This can be a bit nerve-wracking, but I've done it twice without breaking anything, so it can be done. You can read the most up-to-date drive for flashing new firmware here. I used an LG WH16NS40 with patched firmware for the most recent version of this guide. MakeMKV is a program for Windows, macOS, and Linux that can rip DVD and Blu-ray discs into the versatile MKV video format. There are other paid programs that offer more features, like DeUHD and AnyDVD, but we'll be using MakeMKV for this tutorial, since it's free. Technically, it's only free while in beta, but it's been 'in beta' for about 10 years.

You just need to use the latest beta key whenever it asks you to register, which is about once a month.

You can purchase a license for $50 if you want to avoid this annoyance. Install MakeMKV and open the program, then enter the key when prompted (or enter it later under the Help > Register menu). If you're only ripping traditional Blu-rays, that's all you need to do.

Makemkv dvd ripping