www.makemkv.com

I tried opening the recent Sony Blu-ray of D.E.B.S. and it just displays the small jpg image that usually shows up while a disc is loading. It's been an hour now...

There are no errors or anything, as usually happens if I have the wrong region or accidentally open it as a DVD instead of a Blu-ray or something. I can rip it fine with MakeMKV, but with no access to the menus I'm not sure what anything is.

Have you tried mounting the ISO file as a virtual drive and opening the virtual drive as a Blu-ray in VLC, as well as updating Java (in case an outdated version of Java could be preventing you from accessing the menus ?)

EDIT : To clarify, have you tried this ?

1) Make a *full* decrypted backup of the disc with MakeMKV (not an MKV rip),
2) Turn the resulting folder into a proper ISO file (you have to use UDF 2.50 I believe) with a tool such as IMGBurn,
3) Mount the ISO file as a virtual drive,
4) In VLC, do Media -> Open Disc -> Disc -> Tick "Blu-ray" and select the virtual drive as a device, then click on "play" ?

I updated Java and now when I open the disc I get an error saying Java isn't detected on my system so the disc will play without menus...

I get an error saying Java isn't detected on my system

Odd. Could you please confirm the following things :

1) You have a 64-bit Windows operating system,

2) You are using the latest 64-bit version of VLC,

3) You are using the latest 64-bit version of Java.

(Mixing CPU architectures - namely 32-bit and 64-bit - is unlikely to work).

I don't know how to check/confirm those things. I ended up installing both 32- and 64-bit versions of Java, which I vaguely recall having done in the past for something (and indeed when I updated the installer said I had two older versions currently installed). So it really ought to be fine regardless of which VLC it is.

Interestingly, when I open a disc with MakeMKV it says it's using Java from C:/Program Files/Eclipse Adoptium/jdk-17.0.4.101-hotspot/bin/java.exe, but when I run the Java installer it installs to C:/Program Files/Java/jre1.8.0_491