www.makemkv.com

I have three optical drives, one LG Blu-Ray/DVD RW, one Dell DVDRW, and one Samsung DVD/RW. I started ripping all of my television series and movies to use on an Plex/Unraid media server. I run all three drives, using MakeMKV, at once, to get finished sooner, and was about to purchase the full license of MakeMKV, but now have an issue. I have started having trouble with the drive region codes changing, without prompting me, and without my foreknowledge, and without my approval. I have looked in the forums and not found an answer, other than the onus is on the software user, not the software itself.
I have both Region 1 and Region 2 DVDs of television series and movies. My home BD player is region free, and I was under the impression that MakeMKV doesn't care about region codes...however, I am seeing something to the contrary. I have been ripping my DVDs for several months now, and I have occasionally gotten errors that I could not rip a Region 2 DVD because the Region Code on my device was wrong, so I forced one of my drives to be Region 2, as a work around. This message was rare, as I usually, could rip Region 2 with no issues, using any drive--even on my laptop when I felt like ripping four DVDs at a time.
Now, I have a bigger issue. ALL of my devices, on my desktop and laptop are down to 1 region change. The Samsung drive is back to region 1, which I did not change, nor have I manually changed the other two devices. In the MakeMKV log file, I would see "the Region setting of drive ####### does not match the region of currently inserted disc, trying to work around..." message. I did not know its work-around was to change the region code of my drives.This is going to be very expensive, to replace my three optical drives, every time I swap a region 1 DVD for a region 2 DVD. Had I known that MakeMKV was Region Specific in this way, I would have opted for a better work flow, where each DVD went to its region specific drive. Until I know that this is fixed, I don't feel compelled to buy a license.

I have never had MakeMKV change the region setting on a drive, and I regularly get "out of region" discs, both DVD and BD. For a long time, my primary BD drive didn't have its region set, which meant Windows didn't like to play DVDs.

That said, I have had times where MakeMKV said it was being refused access to the drive due to region coding, but, it ripped the disk anyway. None of my drives are "region free", but I haven't been prompted to change a region since I stopped using programs other than MakeMKV and VLC (which also ignores region coding) to access disks.

A quick search on Google came up with links to a couple of utilities to check your drive's region status (what it is now, how many changes you have left), and some that will reset the counter, or remove region coding completely. If your drives are "LibreDrive compatible", they can be told to ignore region coding, as well.