www.makemkv.com

I am new to Making Blu-ray files. This is what I am seeing:
Files for the Star Trek TOS episodes show "Windows Media Video VC1" in the codec info on VLC player
Files for another movie show "H 264-MPEG 4 AVC, Part 10, AVC1" in the codec info on VLC Player
The file info on MakeMKV readout shows M2ts for both of above discs.
My question is how do I know what codec is going to be outputted from the software?

When I make MKVs of a regular DVD I get the standard Mpeg2 files, which I understand.

Using Handbrake, I can load a Mpeg2 file and get out ah264 file that is a lot smaller and looks the same as far as I can tell.
Loading any of the above blu-ray files, it does not work at all. I am sure I am missing something and/or doing something wrong or trying to do something I should not.

Any of your thoughts will be helpful.

You could search for the title at blu-ray.com and see what codec it is using.
For example: http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Star-Trek ... -ray/7192/

Makemkv doesnt change the codec, it just creates an mkv container.

Blu-ray movies use one of two codecs, VC-1 or AVC. Older movies used mpeg2.

Thanks Ravenwood, I should have known and once you said what you did, I had one of those could have had a V8 moments.