www.makemkv.com

I have a collection of BluRay and DVDs that I am looking to Rip so that I can store them on my Synology NAS and play them via Plex to my devices.

I had gotten a recommendation on using MakeMKV to convert the discs to digital files.

Besides installing the MakeMKV software, is there anything that I need to install or download to complete this project?

What are the recommended settings and steps that I should take?

Running on MacOS 15.1.1, MacBook Pro w/ M4 Pro.

Thank you in advance for your guidance.

You need an optical drive of course.

The default settings of MakeMKV should be a reasonable place to start. Most people turn on 'Expert Mode' on the General tab in preferences.

And Sequoia's security settings will make things unnecessarily hard. Gatekeeper in macOS X 15 Sequoia

How do I identify what items correspond to which special feature, movie or episode? Are there easy tools or resources that I could use to help simplify this craziness?

If the title happens to be in the dvdcompare.net database, that can be helpful.

Sometimes reviews of the disc on https://www.blu-ray.com contain enough information to help you sort out which of the disc extras are which.

There's also https://thediscdb.com

Some people employ a strategy of ripping everything and then sorting through it. I usually make a decrypted backup of a disc and then play individual .m2ts files (in the BDMV/STREAM/ folder) to figure out various things are (with the help of the things above). Once I've named everything correctly, I then create .mkv files from the backup with MakeMKV.