Accessing Blu-rays on Windows 11 - me, the OS, or my drive?

Hey, so I've got a little techy problem and thought I'd seek advice here before doing anything drastic like trying to spend money or go to Widnows Restore.

I use a Surface Book 2 most of the time, and I have a portable Blu-ray drive (specifically a Samsung SE-506). I've used this drive with the machine for years, mostly to rip discs so I can put them on a tablet or stream them from a home network. It's worked fine for DVDs and Blu-rays all this time.

I'd not used the drive in a while, but last month I've got it back out again and whilst it's fine reading DVDs, whenever it tries to access a Blu-ray it just spins and spins and eventually times out, as if it can't read the disc. In between it working fine and it not working I've upgraded to Windows 11, so I'm not sure if that's to blame.

Possible things that might explain it:

• The drive needs more power than one USB port provides, so I need to invest in a two-port USB splitter: I didn't have to before, it worked fine with this machine.
• Drive needs a firmware upgrade: the only one I can find online is older than the drive itself, and like I said it was working okay about 6-9 months ago.
• I don't have the right Blu-ray codec: no idea really. When I use VLC to try to read the disc it literally says it can't FIND the disc, not that it doesn't have the right codec to play it. Same when I use MakeMKV to rip it - it just says there's no disc in the drive.
• The Blu-rays are faulty: very unlikely as they work on my Xbox.
• The drive is broken: I mean, maybe! But it still reads DVDs.