SamuriHL
UHD Guru
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I don't know if this belongs in third party or here. Quite frankly I don't think it matters. But for people with friendly drives or people looking to buy friendly drives and are concerned about the firmware version, Mike over at MakeMKV has been doing a TREMENDOUS amount of work the past many months. He has released this:
https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=19113
What the MK firmware versions do is restore certain abilities that new firmware versions take away. Mike's focus is on making the drives LibreDrive compatible, however, for certain drives doing so tends to restore them to friendly drive status. Looking at you BW-16D1HT! Quite a few drives have their latest firmware patched for MK. The beauty of these firmware versions is they do not require any special tricks to flash them. You just use the modified ASUS or LG windows flashers and flash the drive.
So if you're already on a "friendly" version why would you ever want to upgrade? I know I've said not to many times. But that was before Mike released these MK versions which restore functionality. And sometimes those new firmware versions actually do improve things. Like the BW-16D1HT, for example. It fixes the sleep bug in the recently released 3.10 version.
If your drive is working fine for you as is, you may not care about this. If you buy a new drive and it comes with a new version (the BW-16D1HT 3.10 version, as an example, does NOT allow downgrade enabled firmware to be flashed so the only way to restore that ability is to flash the MK 3.10 firmware) then this is a great solution to make it friendly.
https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=19113
What the MK firmware versions do is restore certain abilities that new firmware versions take away. Mike's focus is on making the drives LibreDrive compatible, however, for certain drives doing so tends to restore them to friendly drive status. Looking at you BW-16D1HT! Quite a few drives have their latest firmware patched for MK. The beauty of these firmware versions is they do not require any special tricks to flash them. You just use the modified ASUS or LG windows flashers and flash the drive.
So if you're already on a "friendly" version why would you ever want to upgrade? I know I've said not to many times. But that was before Mike released these MK versions which restore functionality. And sometimes those new firmware versions actually do improve things. Like the BW-16D1HT, for example. It fixes the sleep bug in the recently released 3.10 version.
If your drive is working fine for you as is, you may not care about this. If you buy a new drive and it comes with a new version (the BW-16D1HT 3.10 version, as an example, does NOT allow downgrade enabled firmware to be flashed so the only way to restore that ability is to flash the MK 3.10 firmware) then this is a great solution to make it friendly.