Online media streaming platforms have exploded over the last number of years. There are so many options to watch your content from, Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu, to name a few. They all work really well. You pay a subscription to one or more of these services, and you can choose, what you want to watch, and when you want to watch it. After a while though, those subscriptions start to add up. Another option is to buy movies on iTunes, YouTube, or Amazon Prime Video. Unfortunately, whether you subscribe to streaming services or buy digital movies, you are tied into that ecosystem. Most times you can't watch outside of that platform and sometimes can't watch at all offline. And if that platform chooses, for any reason, to remove the video from their platform, even though you paid for it, you are up a creek. This has caused many of us to look into alternative solutions to owning and streaming media.
One way is by purchasing physical disks of your movies or tv shows. You then own the media and can play them how you wish. Blu-rays specifically usually offer higher quality video and audio, than streaming a movie. You could play them directly on a blu-ray player for your TV. Or you can rip the disks to a computer and stream them using plex or jellyfin. Both of these programs support almost any device, computer, TV, tablet, and phone. This makes it really convenient to stream all your media in one place.
To rip disks, you just need a blu-ray disk drive, and maybe an enclosure, depending on your computer configuration. And also 3 pieces of software:
MakeMKV offers a demo license that can be obtained on their website. It's only valid for a limited time. So you'll need to get a new key every so often. Or you can purchase a license from them and not have to worry about it.
If you're looking to rip UHD content, the disk drive you get needs to support UHD and may need the firmware upgraded to support that. The drive linked above is what I use and I have successfully upgraded its firmware, and it's fairly straightforward.
Ripping a blu-ray to mkv will give you a very large uncompressed file. Oftentimes, 30+ GB in file size. You can keep it like that, or you can use Handbrake to transcode it to a more manageable file size, closer to 4-7GB. I use the HQ 1080p30 Surround preset and that gives you a great quality trancode. If doing UHD, then just change Resolution under the Dimensions tab to 4k.
When transcoding completes, that's it! Save it to your media folder on your PC or Plex media library and go enjoy it!