www.makemkv.com

I would love to have been able to buy a pioneer drive from the forum, but unfortunately I do not have that kind of disposable cash. So I decided to start out cheaper and bought a verbatim 43888 as everything I found online said that it would work with makemkv.
I have connected it and downloaded makemkv and seen in the logs a message with a dump file. I emailed that dump file to support@makemkv.com. I just tried to rip my first 4k uhd and received errors about illegal request copy protection key. I tried chatGPT which advised me to check and possibly download the latest firmware for the optical drive. I have read enough on here to know that is probably not the safest idea and wanted to see if anyone could tell me if that is safe and what I should do, or if I am missing something before moving forward.

Thanks for any help.

Post your drive details (from the first screen of MakeMKV). Your Verbatim 43888 probably has an LG BU40N drive inside it and needs to be flashed to add LibreDrive support so that you can successfully rip 4K UHDs.

If it is the case that your drive is a BU40N, you'll be able to find links to the necessary tools and firmware along with instructions in the Ultimate UHD Drives Flashing Guide.