Blu Ray drive for Mac Pro (1 Viewer)

[Nelson Au]

Rodney, I purchased the Region B locked Masters of Cinema Eureka blu ray release of The Flight of the Phoenix recently and immediately ripped it with MakeMKV. It played fine and I even synched it up with the old DVD to compare image quality. There was no difference in speed. I did try to play the blu ray on my Oppo and it would not play beyond showing me an image that says play back is only possible with a region B player.

I think I read somewhere, probably the MakeMKV forums, that the software is what makes these discs region locked. Once you get past that with a player that can read the region information, the movie file itself is the same regardless of country/region.

 

[jcroy]

I think I read somewhere, probably the MakeMKV forums, that the software is what makes these discs region locked. Once you get past that with a player that can read the region information, the movie file itself is the same regardless of country/region.

As far as I can tell from reading some unofficial technical documents/data and looking at the behavior of ripping programs, the bluray region locking mechanism appears to be done as software.

In contrast, the region locking mechanism for dvd is actually done at the hardware level. Basically if there is a region mismatch and/or if no region is set on the drive, the dvd drive will returned back an error if you request the title key for a particular vob by the official authentication algorithm. (There are other ways of cracking the title keys, which doesn't involve official authentication and/or a region mismatch).

 

[Peter Apruzzese]

Rodney, I purchased the Region B locked Masters of Cinema Eureka blu ray release of The Flight of the Phoenix recently and immediately ripped it with MakeMKV. It played fine and I even synched it up with the old DVD to compare image quality. There was no difference in speed. I did try to play the blu ray on my Oppo and it would not play beyond showing me an image that says play back is only possible with a region B player.

I think I read somewhere, probably the MakeMKV forums, that the software is what makes these discs region locked. Once you get past that with a player that can read the region information, the movie file itself is the same regardless of country/region.

There would be no PAL speedup with regards to a different region Blu-ray. HD doesn't care about NTSC/PAL etc.

 

[Nelson Au]

Peter, that is what I understood from what I read about the playback speed of different region Blu Rays. Thanks for adding the explanation.

 

[Nelson Au]

Jr, I have not tried other region DVD discs yet, that’s good to know.

 

[jcroy]

Jr, I have not tried other region DVD discs yet, that’s good to know.

Factually I can say that the dvd region locking mechanism appears to mostly function by hardware.

Years ago I looked at the dvd's generic css drm system, by writing some of my own computer code to understand how the official authentication mechanism functions. I've ran my own dvd authentication code on cases for many combinations where there is a region mismatch, no default region set, drives from different manufacturers, etc ....

The error messages (ie. scsi sense data) returned on these cases, will tell you what exactly is the error and sometimes why it happened.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

The native Plex app for AppleTV got upgraded at some point recently and the video playback is so much better than it used to be. I’ll stick with Infuse for now but this is a great surprise. The Plex app supports bonus features saved with the movie and the Infuse app doesn’t, but the Plex app used to look so bad on AppleTV that it wasn’t worth watching those bonuses. Now I can. I think this will pay off big time for me.

 

[Nelson Au]

Josh, I noticed that too! It made it handy to watch some supplements on a recent movie I added to the library.

 

[Rodney]

Well, I'm confused. I ripped the blu-ray of "The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh" and at the beginning of part three is missing a few seconds of sound. It should have music and then The Scarecrow says "There are some prisoners in the castle." Instead there is no sound at all until he says "They have asked for my help". The MakeMKV rip had no errors, appeared fine, The blu-ray does not have this issue, you hear the audio that is missing from the MKV. I even tried ripping it again with the same result.

Two questions:

• Has anyone else experienced this issue?
• I thought if a rip was successful it would be a perfect copy, and not have these anomalies. Is that not the case?

It's only 4-5 seconds of sound, but it really bugs me!

 

[DaveF]

Well, I'm confused. I ripped the blu-ray of "The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh" and at the beginning of part three is missing a few seconds of sound. It should have music and then The Scarecrow says "There are some prisoners in the castle." Instead there is no sound at all until he says "They have asked for my help". The MakeMKV rip had no errors, appeared fine, The blu-ray does not have this issue, you hear the audio that is missing from the MKV. I even tried ripping it again with the same result.

Two questions:

• Has anyone else experienced this issue?
• I thought if a rip was successful it would be a perfect copy, and not have these anomalies. Is that not the case?

It's only 4-5 seconds of sound, but it really bugs me!

The most common cause of problems I've found is getting the wrong main title. I don't have this disc (am unfamiliar with it) so can't make any specific comments.

 

[Rodney]

The most common cause of problems I've found is getting the wrong main title. I don't have this disc (am unfamiliar with it) so can't make any specific comments.

I only show one main title for this blu-ray. And you need to watch more Disney.

 

[DaveF]

That’s a bit before my time.

I’ve not had any rips lose a few seconds of sound. I’ve got one DVD set (Firefly) that has weird color problems throughout that don’t appear when playing the discs themselves; I’ve never figured that out. Otherwise, I’ve found rips play identically to the disc.

Do you rip all audio tracks? Is it possible there’s an alternate audio track you should be using instead, and the one you’re listening too just doesn’t have the opening seconds?

 

[Citizen87645]

I've run into a problem recently as well, ripping a "D.A.D." DVD. Basically, it's minimal video (static images for each track) but high res (24/96) audio on a single LPCM track. MakeMKV only rips the last song of the disc on both DADs I own. There are no tracks to select though, and somehow it just does the last song.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Well, I'm confused. I ripped the blu-ray of "The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh" and at the beginning of part three is missing a few seconds of sound. It should have music and then The Scarecrow says "There are some prisoners in the castle." Instead there is no sound at all until he says "They have asked for my help". The MakeMKV rip had no errors, appeared fine, The blu-ray does not have this issue, you hear the audio that is missing from the MKV. I even tried ripping it again with the same result.

Two questions:

• Has anyone else experienced this issue?
• I thought if a rip was successful it would be a perfect copy, and not have these anomalies. Is that not the case?

It's only 4-5 seconds of sound, but it really bugs me!

Can you provide the time code? I think I have this ripped and I can check mine to see if the same happened. Please note, my actual copy of the physical disc isn’t accessible to me so I can’t do any disc to rip comparisons or troubleshooting at this time.

 

[Rodney]

Can you provide the time code? I think I have this ripped and I can check mine to see if the same happened. Please note, my actual copy of the physical disc isn’t accessible to me so I can’t do any disc to rip comparisons or troubleshooting at this time.

It's at the start of Chapter 3, 1:41:40

Do you rip all audio tracks? Is it possible there’s an alternate audio track you should be using instead, and the one you’re listening too just doesn’t have the opening seconds?

There is only one audio track.

 

[DaveF]

It's at the start of Chapter 3, 1:41:40


There is only one audio track.

Set your MakeMKV settings to have a minimum length of 4 seconds (or shorter), then rip. Examine the 5-second files that aren't currently being extracted to make sure they're not the missing audio. This feels to me like a playlist reconstruction problem but the necessary small clip is excluded by minimum settings.

It's still an oddity if so. But these problems tend to be due to disc and ripper interactions rather than data-fidelity problems in the rip per se.

 

[DaveF]

I've run into a problem recently as well, ripping a "D.A.D." DVD. Basically, it's minimal video (static images for each track) but high res (24/96) audio on a single LPCM track. MakeMKV only rips the last song of the disc on both DADs I own. There are no tracks to select though, and somehow it just does the last song.

What are you MakeMKV settings? A lot of people have minimum length settings set to target just getting a movie title and exclude all the sub-ten minute extras and trailers and etc. If you've got a minimum file length larger than all (but one) of the songs, they would be excluded from the rip or demux.

 

[Citizen87645]

Minimum length is 60 seconds. The song tracks are 3 minutes long or above.

 

[Rodney]

Set your MakeMKV settings to have a minimum length of 4 seconds (or shorter), then rip. Examine the 5-second files that aren't currently being extracted to make sure they're not the missing audio. This feels to me like a playlist reconstruction problem but the necessary small clip is excluded by minimum settings.

It's still an oddity if so. But these problems tend to be due to disc and ripper interactions rather than data-fidelity problems in the rip per se.

Thanks for the suggestion, but no change. All I got were 8 additional files like the Disney logo, the piracy is a crime, warning, views of the commentary, static page for selecting the movie, etc.
Checking the main title and it has the same missing audio for 4-5 seconds. I've posted over at the MAKEMKV forum to see if someone has a suggestion there.

 

[DaveF]

That is odd. Will be curious what the issue is when you figure it out.