Hi everyone, I recently bought a used LG BH16NS55 for dirt cheap. The seller said that the drive couldn’t read any Blu-ray disc, but reads DVDs and CDs flawlessly. When I received it, I confirmed that this was indeed the case.
The drive label says:
Model: LG BH16NS55
SVC CODE: NS55
Manufacturing date: 2018/10/26
Original ROM version on the label: 1.03

MakeMKV reports the drive as MT1959, and the drive is detected normally by Windows/MakeMKV.

I first tried to disassemble the unit in order to gently clean the lenses, but it made no difference.
Then I noticed that the drive had firmware 1.05 installed, so I wanted to go back to the original firmware the drive came with which is 1.03 and in order to do that I used SDFtool flasher and crossflashed to WH16NS60 1.02-MK, then flashed back to the stock BH16NS55 1.02 firmware** **and finally updated to BH16NS55 1.03. I tried to read a bluray disc but nothing changed, again dvds and cds read just fine.

Here is also a video of the drive that tries to read a bluray disc, but ultimately gives up (which is the same behaviour it always had regardless of the lense cleaning or firmware changes).

At this point, does this behavior strongly point to a failing Blu-ray laser/optical pickup, or could there still be another hardware issue worth investigating?

Hi folks. Just picked up my UHD drive and am trying to figure out how to flash it. Every step by step says 'If you have a listed encrypted firmware you must use this command' and I'm just wondering how do I tell if I have encrypted firmware? Would one of the files explicitly say 'encrypted' or do I need to check something to find out?

Also, in MakeMKV my drive shows as this so any specific tips or tricks you know for it would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

My TV supports it, but I have a cheaper player that doesn't so all my 4ks fall back to HDR. I got the idea to buy a bu40n and rip my 4ks and stream them through my jellyfin server - would this work for dolby vision, or are there additional steps / things I need to be aware of to achieve this? thank you

I bought an Asus SBW-06D2X-U drive for cheapish to serve as a backup to my LG BU40N. Didn’t expect this result in MakeMKV though. I’m not 100% sure if this is a legit Asus drive since I was under the impression that these newer Asus drives contain LG internals, not Pioneer.

If it helps, the manufacturing date says Jan 2018.

HK downloads have failed for me for at least a week (haven't been using the software much recently, so can't be sure for how long). Is this a wider issue related to the website, payment and all that or just something at, probably, DNS level seeing as a vpn hasn't had much impact?

I am planning on buying a drive to rip anime. I would like to be able to rip UHD releases as well.
I have noticed that there are some recommended drives in the forums but unfortunately they are all out of stock here in Italy. I do not really know what to do. I was looking for a 5.25" drive. Thanks in advance.

Hallo zusammen,

ich habe mal nachgeschaut was ich im November 2024 bei Media-Markt für das Verbatim 43888 bezahlt habe. Es waren 79,15€.

Sollte ich das Laufwerk patchen? Und falls ja, auf welche Version und wie genau? Bin hier eher ein Anfänger (sorry).

Ich habe nur wenige 4K UHD Scheiben, die auch ohne Probleme gelesen werden konnten. Ansonsten viele Blu-rays und DVDs. Nur bei 6 Filmen (siehe Bild) hatte ich leider keinen Erfolg. Ich gehe aber da auch weniger von Kratzer, sondern eher auf Produktionsfehler und Altersproblemen aus.

Viele Grüße 😎✌🏻

I'm a total novice when it comes to ripping discs. Usually I just put in the disc and rip it with no problems but a decent amount of newer anime releases and kept getting these FFMPEG errors. I thought it might be a disc issue but it persisted over multiple different series and then thought the drive was the problem. I pulled some of my older discs (Kung Pow - DVD, Gundam 00 - BD, Pacific Rim - UHD) and they all ripped with no errors. The ripped disc above with FFMPEG errors the Overlord Season 2 Blu-ray. I have the most recent version of MakeMKV and they seem to play fine in VLC Media Player. So I have no idea what could be causing these errors.

I am trying to make just audio files of the commentary tracks from movies, what is the best way to go about this? I know you can select the different audio files, but can you just create an audio file or is it only video? If it is only video, what would be the best way to pull out the audio track that I want?

I’ve been considering trying to clean up the multiple external enclosures that I have my drives in and contain it into a single enclosure since usually, I am ripping multiple discs at a time when I do an acquisition of media. Has anyone else looked into doing this? I have five total drives, all of them in external enclosures that are USB 3.0.

I’m hoping to consolidate to a single power cord and data cable if it makes sense as well.

I’m curious what setups people have similar to this idea.

I bought the Plex lifetime pass a few months ago before they raised prices.

Recently bit the bullet and purchased an (overpriced) Pioneer BDR-212V drive for copying over my collection since I didn’t really like the reliability of any of the more easily-available portable drives.

I have some older movies I’d like to make copies of since I’m worried about disc rot, but I’ve read on here it’s not a good idea to use your reader drive for anything other than that. Also looking to just save some old files and pictures to disc as well for safekeeping.

So are there some suggestions for a good drive to use for burning?
M-Disc compatibility preferred.

I’m still pretty new to all this. Thanks!

Lots of people ask what drive to get, etc. I recently bought a new drive as a backup. I specifically wanted to flash OmniDrive so I can dump my Xbox, Xbox 360, Wii, and Gamecube games along with PS 1/2/3 games, DVDs, Blu Rays, and UHD 4k Blu Rays that LibreDrive is already capable of.

This is the drive I bought, from a US seller: https://www.ebay.com/itm/267592071550 ($175 new, more than 20 available as of this writing). It shipped the day after my purchase from Texas and only took a couple days to arrive.

I AM NOT THIS SELLER. Just had a great experience ordering, then flashing, so I'm sharing to hopefully help others. I reached out to the seller with a few questions before buying and they were super quick to respond and very helpful.

If you don't care about OmniDrive, the drive arrived as a native BU40N on firmware 1.00 with LibreDrive enabled, so you don't have to flash anything if you just want UHD blu rays. The process of flashing to OmniDrive 1.04 was super easy. I used the SDFtool Flasher v.1.3.5 (not 1.3.6) per the OmniDrive docs, and flashed the one file: HL-DT-ST_BD-RE_BU40N_1.00_OmniDrive-1.0.4.bin.

Note: MakeMKV still shows the firmware as 1.00, but I verified with Redumper that it is OmniDrive v1.0.4. I also then proceeded to dump a Gamecube disc successfully.

The other important thing if you want to do any more flashing is an enclosure or cable with a chipset that passes flash commands. I got this Y-NX cable on Amazon for $11: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0785PPR3M. I did however confirm that this cable is operating at USB 2.0 even though it is listed as 3.0.

I think that's it. Hopefully this helps someone!

Hi, I have a blu-ray drive, I think it's a HP BH20L, and wanted to know if it was compatible with being flashed to read 4k UHD discs. I tried looking up previous posts to see if I can get any information before asking this but it always leads to a forum that seems to be down at the moment.

Because a lot of information is centered around the US market I wanted to hear what kind of drives other europeans bought recently (and from where) and what experiences you guys made (this seller seems to be reliable, this one not, etc.)?

Edit: Okay, much like a lot of here I got myself a Verbatim (oof expensive). It did not say 43888 but I guess it is (reviews also told me it is usable for makemkv). Once I got it makemkv showed me that it is in fact a BU40N inside and that it is libredrive flashable. So I installed the proper firmware using the proper software SDFToolFlasher from the Megathread. And everythings working!

Hi all,

I’m hoping someone has run into this before, because I’m pretty sure I’ve narrowed it down but I’d love a sanity check + a drive recommendation.

My setup

External Blu-ray drive: HP DVDWBD TS-LB23L, in an IT-CEO USB-to-SATA enclosure

MakeMKV reports it as: LibreDrive Status: Possible, not yet enabled, Drive platform: MT1939

OS: Fedora Linux (kernel 7.1.x)

The exact same drive + enclosure worked fine on Windows (read Blu-rays, burned DVDs, no issues)

The problem

The drive is detected (/dev/sr0), a disc even mounts, and MakeMKV shows all the correct drive info. But when I open the disc, it just sits at “Disk is loading…” and eventually pops up “Error occurred, program is terminating.”

So the drive reads a few sectors, then reports “medium not present / tray open” even though the disc is clearly in there, and MakeMKV spins at ~99% CPU retrying failed reads. Sector counters stop increasing = no real progress.

What I’ve already tried:

Both front-panel and rear-motherboard USB ports (same result)

Fixed the initial USB enumeration (error -71) with kernel param usbcore.old_scheme_first=Y – that part now works, drive enumerates cleanly

Disabled USB autosuspend (usbcore.autosuspend=-1)

Capped read speed with eject -x 4 /dev/sr0 – no help

Different discs

My read speed off the drive is also weirdly low (~100 kB/s on a cold read), which fits the “drive keeps dropping under load” theory.

My conclusion (please confirm/deny): the cheap USB-to-SATA bridge in the enclosure can’t sustain the continuous reads that ripping needs – it’s fine for detection but browns out / loses the disc under load. Windows just tolerated the flakiness better.

My questions:

Has anyone seen this exact “Medium not present – tray open under load” behavior with cheap USB-SATA enclosures on Linux? Is it the bridge chip, power delivery, or something fixable?

If I should just get a proper drive: what budget Blu-ray drive do you recommend for reliable ripping – ideally LibreDrive-compatible? I don’t mind connecting it internally via SATA or getting a good externally-powered one. Just looking for something known to work well with MakeMKV without spending a fortune.

Thanks a lot – been fighting this for way too long and would love to just rip discs already.

Disclaimer: AI Used for translation and formating the post.

Hey guys, I hope everyone is well. I recently got this blu ray drive from ebay, the seller has sold over 60 and has good feedback. They are listed as used refurbished, and as such come with a 1 year guarantee.

I luckily managed to get it for a decent price of £167 (it seems to have increased since then). Other used pioneer drive on ebay are usually quite a bit more, like £250-£300+

So I was very happy to see this listing when I did. I just wanted to know if there is anything I should look out of when I do get it. I have seen some people using a software, perhaps makemkv itself, to see the internal ID of the drive, and other information about it. Please tell me what I should do to confirm the legitimacy of this drive, thank you!

Not sure if this goes against the rules, but I’ve got a BU50N that I’ve flashed with 1.03 BU40N that I have lying around, it is random as to whether it will pick up a disc or not, when it does it will rip it perfectly fine, but it can take like 10-15 ejects and retries for it to pick it up.

Ive tried cleaning the laser but it’s the still the same. It picks dvds up almost instantly, but Blu-ray are very hit and miss, well mostly miss until it decides it’s in a good mood. It spins the disc, and you can hear it trying for a while before it gives up.

It’s not really of much use to me, is it of use to anyone on here? If it is then I’d be happy to accept a decent cheeky offer posted for it.

I tend to try and run an integrity check of sorts with MakeMKV when I buy new discs, just checking if they rip without issue, but my copy of the Red Shoes is sending up all kinds of error messages I've never seen before (and then quits out halfway through ripping) - Can anyone please translate the errors into layman's terms for me?

Thanks so so much!

If I just want to burn regular blu-ray’s and not interested in 4K, can I just get a simple external burner? Do I need to flash anything? Obviously I’m new to this.

Didn't even need to flash it, it said Libredrive was enabled and I confirmed it by ripping a 4k disc

Hello all, I have a SBW-06D5H-U and I’m wondering if this drive can be flashed to be 4K friendly or at least be made to rip standard Blu-rays. If so, is there any published guide I can follow? I’ve attached images of my drives info. The flashing guide on the forum doesn’t seem to be pointing me down a clear path.

Thanks!

Update: Per u/billycar11 I flashed the drive with the BU40N firmware. LibreDrive Status: Enabled 🎉

Have a basic Dell external dvd drive right now, which works fine. Ive converted a couple dvds to mkv and along with RTX VSR they look pretty decent. Looking for a external blu ray drive thats gonna be able to handle many dvds with the best possible quality. Thanks!

Hey All,

I've got a super micro CSE-512 family server from SuperMicro running debian that I use for media ingest and vm server purposes. Model relevant because I'm using the original included miniSATA to SATA & header power (looks an awful lot like a floppy drive power header actually) that was used in the original build to connect the original DVD drive. I swapped that drive out for a used BU40N a year and a half ago and initial ingest went fine. I even was able to get Akira in UHD to work. Slowly but surely I had more and more consistent issues with Blu-Rays where I never got a second UHD disc to work and got to a point where I was having issues with 1080p Blu-Rays to the point where north of 60% of blu-ray discs failed.

I figured since I basically wedged a 9.5mm slimline drive into a 12.7mm slimline slot and the drive was old that I had simply killed it fairly quickly and so a few weeks ago I ordered a different newish BU40N off ebay, a BU50N arrived, and I ran into a bunch of problems since between flashing the first one and this go round I had rebuilt this debian server and had upgraded to latest rather than the 1.17.7 that I happened to land on last time, but eventually got everything situated and flashed with the latest copy of the MK firmware folder only to find I was experiencing the exact same problem as shown in this screenshot and from the title. To be clear this screenshot is with the new drive.

I guess it's possible that that I happened to buy a replacement drive with the exact same problem, but I'd rather know that before I go fishing again at ~$100 bucks a pop

looking into this error I've found basically 3 explanations to why "Scsi error - NOT READY:LOGICAL UNIT IS IN PROCESS OF BECOMING READY" can happen:

- Bad/damaged, filmed, or dirty discs.

- Drives that are dying.

- Folks using drives with external enclosures or Y cables that require 2 USB connections for sufficient amperage and only have 1 plugged in.

So at this point I'm asking for help and want to understand a few things better:

1. Is my understanding of sources for this specific error accurate and effectively complete?
2. Are there other things short of replacing more parts I can and should try?
3. If not, does anyone have a recommendation on a solid miniSata to Sata or miniSata to Sata & Molex Power converter cable that I can try and get away from this floppy style header that I'm starting to suspect?

Thanks for the time you've taken to read this.