www.makemkv.com

I downloaded the demo of this a while back and it wouldn't do anything (not sure what was going on, but it wouldn't read any Blu-rays I put in it. I keep coming on forums that recommend it, so thought to give it another try, but low and behold, it's now expired.

Am not against paying for it, but want to SEE IT ACTUALLY WORK at least once.

See viewtopic.php?f=1&t=20579

It explains the "expired" issue, and how to fix it.

Once that is taken care of, a description of what other errors you've seen would help us to resolve the other problems. "Not reading BDs" could be as simple as you don't have a BD-capable drive; MakeMKV doesn't make the hardware more capable.