www.makemkv.com

I am able to rip DVDs without issue, however, upon playback, there appears to be heavy mpeg compression/blocking issues with deterioration/improvement of the picture quality on a cycle that I assume corresponds with the key frames.

I get this issue with files ripped on either of my two BR drives (an Asus and Pioneer) and with playback on either VLC or MPC.

No problems with blurays. Any ideas on how to fix this?

Thanks!

What you describe will happen if there is inadequate bandwidth to get the video to the playback program, but it would be WORSE with BD video than DVD.

Since MakeMKV copies the video as-is after decryption (codec is not changed), you should not be seeing this. Are you playing from a network source, or a locally mounted disk?