The Return of the Living Dead 4K + Blu-Ray

My first choice for a 4K movie was rather obvious... The Return of the Living Dead! BRAAAAAAAINS!!!!

I've been wanting to get this movie on Blu-Ray for a while, I had it on DVD but I really wanted to see all the detail on Trash'... uh, I mean, all the detail on Tarman's slimy body... yeah.
This release is made by Shout Factory, and it was really set out to be amazing, it has a ton of extras, like commentaries, a workprint of the movie, and even a restoration of the original theatrical audio track, with the real Tarman voice, which hadn't really been available at home since the VHS release of the movie.

The only problem is that it didn't come with Spanish (my native language) audio, so if I wanted to watch the movie with my family, I'd have to somehow put the audio from the DVD in there... but that's a story for another day.

The Paul Naschy Collection (Blu-Ray)

A nice and rather varied collection of Paul Naschy movies, mysteriously, their only (legal) Blu-Ray releases that exists, as far as I know... yes, only in the United States, not Spain.

In case you don't know, Paul Naschy was a famous (although, still pretty niche, all things considered) Spanish actor, mainly known for his horror movies, more specifically, his werewolf movies.

In the modern days, he's often called the "Spanish Lon Chaney", and he's actually pretty well known internationally, more than he is in Spain, actually.
Which, I suppose may explain why we haven't actually gotten a collection like this over here, save for the old DVD collection that had 8 movies split across 2 sets (none of them matching the movies in either Shout Factory collection, interestingly enough). Fun fact about that collection, it was one of the last properly legal and licensed releases of Resen and Llamentol, and was of fairly high quality and had nice extras.

The Paul Naschy Collection II (Blu-Ray)

As I mentioned earlier, one of the main problems of this whole setup was that the Blu-Ray burner used a SATA connection, and I didn't really have any free SATA ports anymore.
So, what was the solution? Well, a rather crude one.

Whenever I want to use the burner to rip discs, I have to unplug one of my hard drives to free up a SATA slot. Now, the only hard drive I can easily remove is either one of the drives that I use for actually archiving the movies. But there's a problem with this... both of these drives are setup as one dynamic volume, for multiple reasons, mainly, that I need a folder with hard links to all the ISO files to use with PS3 Net Server, and of course they can't be spread across two drives (I promise, I'll make a blog about how to set that up too, at some point!).

So, before I unplug either two of the drives, I have to make sure I mark them as "offline" before shutting down the computer, otherwise, problems may show up (I'm not actually sure if they will, I don't really want to test it out, but I do it just to be sure).

Thankfully, simply disabling both discs and simply unplugging one works perfectly, without any sort of data corruption problems, so that's the setup I use.
Granted, it's pretty messy, both on the technical side and the physical side, if you look at the image... but, hey, if it works, it works.

Make-MKV

The first thing you'll need to do to rip Blu-Rays is to download and install Make-MKV, and if you need help installing the program... how did you even get here in the first place?

Now, it's important to note that the default installation of Make-MKV won't actually let you rip Blu-Rays, you'll need to activate the program.
Before you start searching for a Torrent, I should let you know that Make-MKV is in a sort of Win-RAR situation, where the program is technically not free, but it also technically is.
The program requires a license key, and you can get a permanent one by buying it, but the creator releases new free public keys on a monthly basis in the Make-MKV forums.
Of course, that means that you have to renew the key every month, but I don't think that's much of a hassle.

Once you've registered, closed and re-opened Make-MKV, and if you've bought the same drive as me, you should see a screen similar to this:

Now, there are a lot of fields here, but these are the ones you should be on the look-out for:

If any of this doesn't match what you see on your Make-MKV window, you should stop the process right now and do some research on your drive before continuing, or you will most likely end up bricking it.

Flashing the drive

The next thing we need to do to get this working is to flash the firmware of our drive by using a tool called SDFTool.
Once you've downloaded it, you should see a window similar to this. Make sure to select your Blu-Ray drive on the drop-down menu, and then select the READ option, because we'll first be making a backup of the original firmware, just in case something goes wrong or you need to return the drive.

Once that's done, make sure you store the ripped .BIN file in a safe place that you will remember, you never know when you'll need it.
Now, you must download the all in one firmware pack that you'll find on the Make-MKV forum thread.
It comes with a bunch of patched firmwares for different drives, but the one we're interested in (if you're using the same drive as us) is the one that's located inside the LG 5.25 desktop folder, named HL-DT-ST-BD-RE_WH16NS60-1.02-NM00100-211810291936.bin.
You may have noticed it's not actually named after the model of the drive we bought, but a later one also made by LG. However, it works with both models, so we'll be using that one.

Select the WRITE option on SDFTool, pick the correct file and then click on START, and wait for the firmware to be flashed.

Once that's done, you should close and re-open Make-MKV, or even reboot your computer if you want to be safe (I didn't need to, I simply re-opened Make-MKV for it to detect the changes), and you should see that it can now actually rip Blu-Rays, and even 4K Blu-Rays!
Again, make sure the information on your screen matches what's on the image, otherwise, you may not have flashed your firmware correctly.

Ripping the discs' contents

Now that we've flashed the drive's firmware, really, we're done, we just have to actually rip the discs now.
There are two main ways of getting the contents out of the disc, the first one, which a lot of people use, is to simply extract the video files in the disc into MKV containers.
I personally don't like this method, as I like to preserve the menus of the DVD's, even those that aren't particularly great, so we'll use the other method, the backup option.
It's the folder icon with a green arrow in Make-MKV.

Once you use that option, Make-MKV will commence the process of ripping the whole disc, menus and everything.
MAKE SURE YOU CHECK THE DECRYPT VIDEO FILES OPTION!!!!
You wouldn't wanna end up with useless, encrypted files, right?

Now, once the process is done, those of you who are used to ripping DVD's with Make-MKV might find a liiiiitle issue. Where's the ISO file???

But don't panic just yet. This is normal.
For whatever reason, Make-MKV does not create ISO files of Blu-Ray and 4K movies, it simply extracts all contents into a folder.
But, this folder is essentially the same as the ISO file, so really, we just need to create an ISO of it.
Although, you technically CAN just use this folder, VLC should be able to just play the .m2ts files inside the BDMV/STREAM folder, and Make-MKV can still rip the video files if you point it to either the index.bdmv or MovieObject.bdmv file inside the BDMV folder.

And that brings us to...

Creating ISO files