If you’ve ever browsed a torrent website (it’s OK to just look, right?) you’ve surely seen movies listed with a retail UHD Blu-ray as the source. Logically, the only way this could happen is if someone used a computer Blu-ray drive to make a digital copy of the original.
Similarly, people who use services like Jellyfin and Plex to digitize their disc collection and then self-host that content in their homes need the hardware to do it. The thing is, getting the right tools is getting harder, which means it could become effectively impossible to get the drives needed to digitize UHD discs.
Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it is illegal to defeat DRM (Digital Rights Management) on a physical disc such as a DVD or Blu-ray. While people certainly do so anyway, there is no grey area here. If the disc has DRM and you circumvent it, you have broken the law wherever the DMCA is in force.
An ordinary Blu-ray drive cannot necessarily rip a UHD disc
The PC Blu-ray situation is strange
The external and internal Blu-ray drives you can readily buy can only read standard Blu-ray discs up to 50GB in size. You can also watch standard Blu-ray on a PC with the right player software easily enough.
However, even if you have a drive capable of reading UHD discs, modern PCs lack the decryption and security hardware needed to play 4K discs. In turn, this means the drives that can read larger BD formats aren’t even designed for movie playback anymore. It’s all about archiving data and burning discs. If you really want to watch a 4K Blu-ray on your PC, you actually have no other choice but to rip it, but that’s just an interesting aside.
What matters here is that, out of the box, these large-capacity BD drives can’t rip commercial discs anyway. They have protection built into their firmware, and even hardware-level features that prevent it. There are a small number of PC Blu-ray drives that have both the right hardware and are hackable with LibreDrive custom firmware. Once you have such a drive, have modded it, and have the right software, you can rip a 4K disc to your PC as a video file.
The drives enthusiasts rely on are disappearing
By design? Does it even matter?
But those drives are going extinct. To give you a few illustrative examples. Pioneer ended production of its Blu-ray PC drives after leaving the optical disc business in 2025. LG’s US pages mark two familiar MakeMKV options, the WH16NS60 and WH16NS40, as discontinued.
You might think that the used market could sustain things for a while, but don’t forget that optical drives are almost completely absent from computers these days. High-capacity Blu-ray burners came out long after PC users went digital. They were aimed at professionals looking to make large backups to optical discs. So they never sold many drives in the first place. With manufacturing of suitable drives ending and current stock sold out, it’s only a matter of time before the remaining drives fail.
Firmware breakthroughs can rescue a drive, but they cannot replace one
The hackers are working on it
While we can’t change the hardware in existing Blu-ray drives that are out there, people are working on making better firmware hacks. In 2025, it was announced on the MakeMKV forum that all Pioneer drives would now support the LibreDrive firmware. Before, only select models would work, so this was a major step in increasing the pool of drives that can do the job.
Despite this leap forward, the list of drives that can be flashed remains small. It’s a smattering of specific LG, Pioneers, and ASUS drives. That is why these specific models command a high price on the used market, if they even go up for sale in the first place.
Preserving the original discs is more important than ever
While I’m sure the dedicated pirates who distribute 4K Blu-ray rips are stockpiling the hardware they need to keep doing this until every UHD disc ever printed is on the net somewhere, the fact is that only so many drives can do the job, and they are already rare.
The DMCA isn’t in effect everywhere in the world, so people could, in theory, make backups of movies they legally bought as long as it doesn’t violate local laws. However, with the actual hardware to do so going away, it’s a moot point.
I don’t think the player hardware is going anywhere soon, though, so this is more a question of locking the highest-quality versions of films to discs. The UHD streaming version is objectively inferior, but a bit-perfect rip is identical in quality to what’s on the disc.
