www.makemkv.com

I am new to this, so forgive me if this is a noob problem/question. I intend to rip trailers and images from 4K discs eventually, but I have only used MakeMKV to back up a few of my Blu-ray discs. They back up just fine, but I can't play them on my MacBook Pro. Not the backups on my computer. Not directly from my drive. The Cyberlink CD included with the drive is only for Windows. If I buy software that allows me to play a movie directly to my MacBook from my drive, will that also allow me to play a Blu-ray backup file on my MacBook?

Any recommendations for truly free software that will accomplish this? Cyberlink and Leawo both offer free trials, but their software upgrades are more expensive than what I paid for my LG drive.

If you've made a backup of a disc, you can open that backup in MakeMKV again to make .mkv files of the various titles on the disc. Once you've done that, you can use any number of players to play the files, VLC, MPV, INA, etc. You can also use the .mkv file as input into the transcoder of your choice to convert it into another format. Handbrake or ffmpeg are popular.

Playing the backup or the blu-ray directly might be possible with a paid-for version of MakeMKV and using its integration with VLC. I don't have a lot of experience doing this.

Playing a blu-ray or UHD with official playback software requires a Windows computer with specific generations of Intel CPUs that support Software Guard Extensions. Intel hasn't supported SGX for their 3 most recent generations of CPUs nor has it ever been supported on AMD CPUs or Apple Silicon.

The route most choose is to get to .mkv files (transcoded to something smaller or not) and watch them with their favorite software and/or host them on something like a local Plex server (or Emby, Jellyfin, Infuse, etc).