Best external BD drive for Mac?

[Woodstock]

"Plays great" and "rips without issue" are two different criteria. You can play a disk "without issue" that has bad sections - the player just skips over the bad spots. Ripping is done to get all the data, including that in the bad sections.

[Zulith]

The drive I have seen most recommended *recently* is the Pioneer BRD-XD07TUHD and that is the one I intend to purchase after a lot of research. My personal criteria was a drive that had no problems on either Windows or Mac, had a small form factor, top loading (front loading is fine but potentially prone to additional issues so why not just avoid it?) and has a good reputation in various reviews around the internet.

Of course there are many good options, and the list in the firmware thread is a great resource.

[TGW_SLO]

I'm not sure this is necessarily 'the best' drive, but I recently purchased an Asus BW-16D1X-U, which supposedly works with both Windows and Mac, although, I had better luck setting it up and working with my Mac (Mac mini M1 running Monterey). So far I've ripped two blue-rays very easily. The only downside was the time it took to actually do the rip.
Aside from that, I am very happy with the drive so far.