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Which firmware to use with my drives?

You can always cross-flash you current drives also to "official" firmware WH16NS60 1.03 which I think works best with LG drives and 3-layer discs where you have your problems. Clean the discs well with liquid soap and warm water before reading them. The initial flashing process is still some mystery. Some drives you can directly downgrade. Some need to be flashed first to MK. Which is the safe way. First MK, then DE.

Your other issue is 50Gb discs. You need Japanese Verbatims and burn them with a Pioneer burner at 2x. Otherwise you will have tremendous quality problems with your burns. I don't burn anymore at all and play everything from a hard drive with my Oppo clone.
 
I did have my LG flashed with WH16N50 1.03, won't work with DVDfab. I really believe that V1.0 is going to be the only FW that works with everything.

I must be blessed with my 2 Asus BW-16D1HT drives. I have burned over 50 Ridata DB50-6X, discs at 6X and zero failures. I do have DB50 "Japanese" Verbatim discs and will try to burn that Jurassic movie at 2X and see what happens. I have probably burned 150-200 DB25 Ridata discs without any failures. I had great luck with non-Japanese Verbatims until recently. New batch took forever (minutes} to initialize in the Asus drives, old Verbatims a few seconds. I sent them back and got more great Ridatas. I agree the best way is to play the movies from a hard drive, but in my house there are many family members/TVs and it is easier to use discs.

The only issue I have is the Jurassic World Dominion burn on BD50's. I don't think the burn is the issue as I ripped and burned 4 times using the 2 Asus drives and different ripping software. All 4 BD discs stop playing exactly at the beginning of the second chapter. It hangs and if you wait for a minute or so it begins to play again and to the end without any other hangs. If I turn off Dolby Vision in my Panasonic players the movie never hangs. This is when I decided that maybe a good "Official" LG UHD drive will solve this problem, was worth a chance. The movie wasn't so hot so no loss, can burn the 1080P version and be happy. I'm sort of a perfectionist when things don't work as previously and hunt down the issue. New released movies may have the same problems. I did clean the disc properly a few days ago per your instructions that I found in another post. BTW the original OEM disc plays fine in the Panasonic BD player, no hangs.

Dolby Vision seems to be a common problem for ripping and burning to a disc.
 
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You have some wrong assumptions but I will take a nap now and respond tomorrow. Night!
 
I downloaded your DE FW, what have you built into it that is different from other DE V1.0?

The firmware you got from whatever firmware archive you used very likely did not have DE set. The only change I made to the firmware I uploaded is setting the DE byte so it can be flashed once you first flash an MK firmware.

You and I both agreed to flash directly
to MK V1.0. I got an error when trying to flash multiple times to MK V1.0.

NO. There is no "MK 1.0". When proper terminology isn't used that is where the confusion sets in. There IS NO MK version of a 1.0 firmware. The only thing that has to happen to 1.0 firmware is to set the DE byte within the firmware bin so that the drive doesn't reject it when it has a newer firmware on it. MK firmware came after the DE byte no longer worked for newer firmware. Mike from MakeMKV modified the firmware more extensively to restore LibreDrive functionality and allow downgrades. This is why you MUST flash a MK version FIRST when you have newer firmware, otherwise you can't downgrade it.

As for drives, Pioneer makes the most reliable drives. There's plenty of them out there. Second to that is the LG BU40N which is a laptop drive, sometimes put in an external USB case like mine.
 
The V1.0 came from the "mk"-firmware-pack-20200720/MK/old folder, one would usually assume that it is a MK version if it's in an MK folder, guess not, my bad!!!

This is the FW flash that I tried first and had the error.
HL-DT-ST-BD-RE_BH16NS60-1.00-NM00500-211804030945.bin

Your PIONEER BD-212U model doesn't seem available anywhere, out of stock.
Which is the next best Pioneer model that one can buy today that can be flashed to work with DVDfab, AnyDVD, MakeMKV, etc.?

Does a laptop drive have the same SATA port connector as on a full size optical drive for USB enclosures/adapters to work?
 
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Yea, that file is not DE enabled so it will fail.

No idea on the Pioneer models. There's a bunch of them known to work without any flashing required. Supposedly there's work being done on a Pioneer flash tool that will be able to do all kinds of neat things. You can check that out on the MakeMKV forum, although there's not much info yet:

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=128132#p128132

I bought an archgon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BC9F98J

It already came in a USB enclosure. But yes, the laptop versions of the BU40N are SATA but require a smaller USB enclosure so a full size enclosure will NOT work.
 
I did have my LG flashed with WH16N50 1.03, won't work with DVDfab. I really believe that V1.0 is going to be the only FW that works with everything.

I must be blessed with my 2 Asus BW-16D1HT drives. I have burned over 50 Ridata DB50-6X, discs at 6X and zero failures. I do have DB50 "Japanese" Verbatim discs and will try to burn that Jurassic movie at 2X and see what happens. I have probably burned 150-200 DB25 Ridata discs without any failures. I had great luck with non-Japanese Verbatims until recently. New batch took forever (minutes} to initialize in the Asus drives, old Verbatims a few seconds. I sent them back and got more great Ridatas. I agree the best way is to play the movies from a hard drive, but in my house there are many family members/TVs and it is easier to use discs.

The only issu.e I have is the Jurassic World Dominion burn on BD50's. I don't think the burn is the issue as I ripped and burned 4 times using the 2 Asus drives and different ripping software. All 4 BD discs stop playing exactly at the beginning of the second chapter. It hangs and if you wait for a minute or so it begins to play again and to the end without any other hangs. If I turn off Dolby Vision in my Panasonic players the movie never hangs. This is when I decided that maybe a good "Official" LG UHD drive will solve this problem, was worth a chance. The movie wasn't so hot so no loss, can burn the 1080P version and be happy. I'm sort of a perfectionist when things don't work as previously and hunt down the issue. New released movies may have the same problems. I did clean the disc properly a few days ago per your instructions that I found in another post. BTW the original OEM disc plays fine in the Panasonic BD player, no hangs.

Dolby Vision seems to be a common problem for ripping and burning to a disc.

What you experience with your 50GB discs isthe transition from the first layer to the second layer of 25GB each. Have a look here:
https://forum.redfox.bz/threads/bd-50gb.80418/page-10
Do you see the big spike? These were high quality discs burned with a Pioneer drive at 2x speed. Burns with higher speed would be worse. Charts with lower quality discs burned with an LG will look much worse. 25GB disc are all no-brainers even for the LG burners.

Now if you could hold on for a while to buy a Pioneer until this WIP for flashing firmware is done you can save quite some money. For burning 50 GB discs it's almost a MUST. If you don't want to wait there's a seller who already sells cross-flashed Pioneers.

https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=19387&start=420
 
Thanks for the link! I like that data and ordered the Opti app.

The movie hangs exactly at the 8:07 point. The hang is only with ripped and burned BD-R discs from 2 different Asus drives playing them on a Panasonic Blu-ray player. The OEM disc does not hang on the Panasonic. Last night I burned the movie to a Japanese Verbatim BD50 at 2X and it hung at 8:07. I then compressed the rip and burned a single layer Ridata BD25 at 6X and the movie still hung at 8:07. This eliminates a disc layer transition issue.

The Jurassic World Dominion OEM disc is the extended version one. You can select at the main menu to play either the standard version or the extended version. The first 8:07 minutes of the extended version are not displayed on the standard version. The standard version starts at this 8:07 point. Anything can be the hang cause here. Also there is no hang if I turn off Dolby Vision in the Panasonic.

My 2 Asus drives burning Ridata Bd25/50 discs have been basically flawless. The Asus drives rip 3 layer UHD discs with ease. I’m very pleased with the results. I just thought that the new LG may fix that hang flaw. If the replacement LG doesn’t fix the hang and works as well as the Asus drives I will use it as an external USB backup. All my ripped UHD discs are stored and backed up on 2 hard drives so disc longevity is of no concern. How long will they produce Blu-ray discs and players, it’s a disappearing format.....
 
Thanks for the link! I like that data and ordered the Opti app.

The movie hangs exactly at the 8:07 point. The hang is only with ripped and burned BD-R discs from 2 different Asus drives playing them on a Panasonic Blu-ray player. The OEM disc does not hang on the Panasonic. Last night I burned the movie to a Japanese Verbatim BD50 at 2X and it hung at 8:07. I then compressed the rip and burned a single layer Ridata BD25 at 6X and the movie still hung at 8:07. This eliminates a disc layer transition issue.

The Jurassic World Dominion OEM disc is the extended version one. You can select at the main menu to play either the standard version or the extended version. The first 8:07 minutes of the extended version are not displayed on the standard version. The standard version starts at this 8:07 point. Anything can be the hang cause here. Also there is no hang if I turn off Dolby Vision in the Panasonic.

My 2 Asus drives burning Ridata Bd25/50 discs have been basically flawless. The Asus drives rip 3 layer UHD discs with ease. I’m very pleased with the results. I just thought that the new LG may fix that hang flaw. If the replacement LG doesn’t fix the hang and works as well as the Asus drives I will use it as an external USB backup. All my ripped UHD discs are stored and backed up on 2 hard drives so disc longevity is of no concern. How long will they produce Blu-ray discs and players, it’s a disappearing format.....
This seems to actually a different issue at 8:07. Seems to be a menu problem. How did you rip the movie? ISO or folder with AnyDVD? With CloneBD?

The Opti app only works with LiteON drives for quality checks. There might be soon a possibility to do quality checks with LGs but also be patient here.
 
Ok, the latest.

The replacement LG WH16BS60 arrived today. Flashed it first with MK1.03, and then with the SamuriHL furnished DE_LG WH16NS60_1.00.bin, FW.
The flashing went well. Works with MakeMKV, AnyDVD, DVDfab, etc.

Now the slightly bad news is the replacement LG (6/2022 build date) can not read the Jurassic World Dominion UHD OEM disc, many errors, same as with the first LG (3/2021 build date). Both Asus BW-16D1HT drives (one 2020, FW V3.0, the other 2021, FW V3.1) read the disc without errors. I rip and burned 5 other 3 layer UHD OEM movie discs without any issues using the new LG. So it looks ok.

Bottom line is that this Jurassic OEM disc is either defective or just a very difficult format to rip and burn correctly. I don't really need a copy as I have the OEM disc to use.
I could return the disc to Amazon and get another, but I only paid $12 for the disc set a few days ago and it will cost me more for gas to drive to the UPS store to return it.

Now seeing that the Asus drives read a problem disc without any issues and the LGs couldn't. Does that make the Asus better, or will the current 2022 Asus drives have the same issues? I don't know.
 
Better is subjective. Different is the only word that applies. You're struggling with triple layer discs which are a pain in the ass to read. It's why I've consistently said to use a bu40n or a Pioneer drive because they are far better at reading triple layer discs. It's great that the Asus can currently read a disc that the lg can't but I promise you you'll be really pissed off when you get a box set like game of thrones and you hit a disc none of your drive will read. Trust me we all had this issue and nearly all of us had to return at least one set in order to rip the whole thing. That's when I gave up on the lg and Asus desktop drives. The only time the bu40n has let me down was on a physically scratched disc. You can hardly fault it for that. The pioneer only failed me once and it wasn't the drive's fault. My Vantec case I have it in was acting up. My ns60 sits below it disconnected in its own Vantec case. That way I can swap them out quickly if I need to as the ns60 is much faster. But what good is speed of you ultimately fail to get a good read?

Sent from my SM-G998U1 using Tapatalk
 
The first link of the one I have. Plug it into a USB c port and it doesn't even need separate power. It just works. I downgraded move to 1.00 firmware and it works in all programs just fine.

Sent from my SM-G998U1 using Tapatalk
 
How old is your drive? The BU40N came out 10 years ago and I’m wondering what parts they are using recently compared to drives a few years old that worked well. I don’t have USB-C on my computer. Will this work with USB 3.0? Looks like it comes with 2 cables, USB USB-C.
 
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I have absolutely no idea where you pulled that "10 years ago" from but no. It's an official UHD drive of which there were none 10 years ago. If you use USB 3 it will require 2 ports, and no you can't just "skip" the second port. It uses one for power and one for data, but yes it'll work.
 
From the product description, last line.........

Package Dimensions 7.76 x 7.4 x 1.73 inches
Item Weight 1.34 pounds
Manufacturer Archgon
ASIN B07BC9F98J
Country of Origin Taiwan
Item model number 8541608851
Customer Reviews
757 ratings

4.5 out of 5 stars
Best Sellers Rank #11 in External Blu-ray Drives
Is Discontinued By Manufacturer No
Date First Available July 18, 2012
 
From the product description, last line.........

Package Dimensions 7.76 x 7.4 x 1.73 inches
Item Weight 1.34 pounds
Manufacturer Archgon
ASIN B07BC9F98J
Country of Origin Taiwan
Item model number 8541608851
Customer Reviews
757 ratings

4.5 out of 5 stars
Best Sellers Rank #11 in External Blu-ray Drives
Is Discontinued By Manufacturer No
Date First Available July 18, 2012
This Archgon most likely had another drive in the enclosure back then. Such companies often just pick what the can get and put that in. You would have to look specifically for the LG BU40B.
 
So it's 6 years. Are they clones for 6 years or use components that may, or may not, work as the when the drive read the best? I'd say it could be a drive lottery.

I will buy one and see!!!!
 
This drive seems to be the best of the LG drives. But it might not solve your problem. You haven't answered my questions:

This seems to actually a different issue at 8:07. Seems to be a menu problem. How did you rip the movie? ISO or folder with AnyDVD? With CloneBD?
 
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