I got the ASUS BW-16D1HT drive but what kind of software do I use to play the 4k discs? I tried Quicktime and VLC but getting an error message and could not play. Any advise or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
For licensing reasons this isn't straightforward.
You can get VLC to play pretty much anything - I have no experience with 4k discs, but with regular blu-rays, it required a dynamic library and an encryption key map, and of course then it only supports the discs that there are decryption keys for in the database.
I am going to bet that there exists no free software that allows you to play 4k discs simply. The VLC trick I mentioned before, whilst not strictly speaking illegal, does bypass the licensing in a semi-hacky way. A commercial product would need to have a license to play the discs.
Thanks, how do I go about being able to play BD thru VLC?
The link above doesn't specifically mention UHD discs, which use different encryption. Something that does work is to use MakeMKV to remove the protection. You can then play the resulting .m2ts files in VLC or IINA.
While I'm here, it's worth mentioning that you should not install any firmware updates for your drive. That particular drive does not officially support UHD discs, and later versions of the firmware actively block it from reading them.