I'm very new to all this, but I just want to make sure I have everything I need before I start.

[yetain]

Hey, I'm kinda new to all this, but I've been motivated to start making some personal fan edits of movies I bought on Blu-Ray and I was just wondering what I'd need exactly to get started. I'm sorry if this isn't the place to ask, I'm just generally unsure where to get started, so if it isn't, I apologize. I only have MakeMKV for obvious reasons, though I didn't install it yet. I'm not looking to rip Ultra HD stuff, as I've learned from browsing a bit on here, that takes more effort to modify certain things, so all I'm doing is standard Blu-Rays. To my knowledge, all I need is:

Video editing software - Got it

MakeMKV - Got it

Some kind of Blu-Ray reader for my computer

The reader is basically the only thing I'm unsure about and I'm also unsure if there's anything that I missed. I looked around on Amazon and there are a lot of Blu-Ray readers, but a lot of the cheaper ones have certain reviews that they quit working after a number of months and the more expensive ones are out of my price range, so if anyone has any recommendations as far as that goes, it's much appreciated. Thank you so much!

[Woodstock]

Rather surprised you haven't looked at the "UHD Drives" portion of the forum, where Ultimate UHD Drives Flashing Guide Updated 2023 comes up quite prominently. It describes pretty much everything you're asking about.

[Radiocomms237]

I would definitely buy a UHD drive straight off, even if it costs a little bit more. That way you're 'future-proofing' your setup for when you graduate to UHD, which you likely will do, eventually!

I'm a bit of a fan of Pioneer drives myself. They're reliable (my current drive would be in the thousands-of-discs-ripped ballpark by now and still hasn't missed a beat (touch wood)), and best of all, they work straight out of the box (no upgrading or flashing or messing around).

When it comes to editing, even with only FullHD (1080) video you will want some decent computing power, like a reasonable GPU at a minimum, otherwise you'll be waiting many hours while your clips encode.

And then there's editing suites, and there's editing suites, if you know what I mean! But that's a topic for another day.

[Billycar11]

I would definitely buy a UHD drive straight off, even if it costs a little bit more. That way you're 'future-proofing' your setup for when you graduate to UHD, which you likely will do, eventually!

I'm a bit of a fan of Pioneer drives myself. They're reliable (my current drive would be in the thousands-of-discs-ripped ballpark by now and still hasn't missed a beat (touch wood)), and best of all, they work straight out of the box (no upgrading or flashing or messing around).

this is no longer true new pioneers come with new fw that disables libredrive and there is no public way to flash them for now you must buy a pioneer from a flasher for it to work.
but i agree the pioneers are way more reliable than the lg/asus drives

[Flesh]

You've got everything you need bud.

If you change your mind & want to rip UHD then you can figure that out in the future.

In regards to concerns of hardware eventually failing; everything eventually fails. Don't be paralyzed trying to figure out the PERFECT thing - you might get the 1/1,000,000 defect model that fails right after the return period anyway. If you're not looking to backup a collection of thousands of movies & shows, you're likely good. I have two readers & 1 failed after what I'd personally consider an abusive amount of use.