Don’t bother with trying to use a player on a computer. Use MakeMKV and a blu-ray drive. Use modified firmware to rip 4K titles. Details can be found on MakeMKV forums.

After you rip them you can re-encode them to save storage space using Handbrake.

Either that or buy a 4K player designed for a TV, like a PS5 or the two most popular Sony and Panasonic players on the market.

- PS5 is a good choice if you need a vertically mounted behind-TV type of setup.

- Sony UBP-X700U is value 4K, just get the updated version which fixes some annoyances of the previous model (I think U is the updated US model)

- Panasonic UB820-K, widely considered to be the best one without spending a thousand bucks.

Overall though, as much as I want blu-ray to be a thing, the market is just dire. I tried to get into it and it’s frustrating.

New release titles often skip blu-ray entirely, especially for demographics that don’t care for the format like kids content. Either that or new titles will skip 4K so you’ll be paying $25 for 1080p when $10 will get you 4K digital. Then when you redeem the movies anywhere code, you don’t get 4K because your blu-ray is only 1080p.

I thought it would be cool to get into some classic 4K upscale cinephile releases like Lawrence of Arabia but it turns out that I can buy the 4K version on Apple TV for like $5 where getting your hands on the disc is like a hundred bucks.

I certainly appreciate the disc releases from outlets like Criterion but $40+ for a movie seems so hard to justify.

The 4K experience on providers like Apple is so excellent, the benefits of blu-ray are so minimal if any at all.

Another random example, my Studio Ghibli transfers on blu-ray are clearly worse quality than HBO Max, and there are no 4K blu-rays except for The Boy and the Heron. There is no motivation to re-do any disc releases of those movies on 4K UHD because nobody is going to buy them.

My feeling is that despite the licensing pitfalls of digital ownership, I’ve concluded that it just makes more sense compared to physical media. Don’t bother with blu-rays. If a license gets revoked from me in the future I’ll just shrug my shoulders and pirate the title.