www.makemkv.com

I went out of my way a few years ago to buy the DVD of a 1981 Hal Needham movie, it's has his audio commentary.
I tried MakeMKV yesterday, version 1.12.0 license type=freeware, on windows 10 home.
It seemed to work great making one mkv file but it has no menus and as far as i can tell none of the extra features on the DVD.
I have an LG blu-ray WH14NS40 drive in my pc,
and the backup button in MakeMKV v1.12.0 was always grayed out.
Is this a license feature issue, do I need to register/purchase MakeMKV?

I seem to read a lot about how MakeMKV will only preserve menus on blu-ray discs and not DVD's which i find hard to believe.
What I want to back up is all older stuff... on DVD in standard resolution.
thanks.

The only reason MakeMKV can "preserve" menus on Bluray is because there is a mode (called "backup") that doesn't produce MKV files; instead, it saves an (optionally) unencrypted version of the entire BD directory structure on your drive.

To do that for DVD, you need only make an ISO of the DVD, and there are lots of free and low-cost tools for that.