Never heard of Ben the tech guy, but that’s an unofficial repo.

The correct installation method is to make from source, as directed on the official forum. Should take about 2 minutes if you’re not familiar with building from source.

MakeMKV is not FOSS and never claimed to be.

Yes it does.

Because it’s a transcoding tool. You may as well complain it doesn’t make your dinner.

Ubuntu had a general crackling issue introduced last year, an issue around a buffer size which I fixed by copying

/usr/share/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf

To ~/.config/pipewire

Uncomment

pulse.min.quantum = 128/48000

And increase to 512/48000. Restart.

systemctl --user restart wireplumber pipewire pipewire-pulse

Increase buffer until stuttering ends. Note this also introduces delay to audio.

Perhaps your issue is something similar? I wouldn’t blindly make these changes on your end, but maybe it’s something to search up on.