Blu Ray drive for Mac Pro (1 Viewer)

[Josh Steinberg]

My dinosaur drive died a couple days ago, so I went ahead and ordered the Pioneer BD/UHD drive that several people here have spoken favorably about. I’ve been using it for a couple hours and so far I’m very happy. Doesn’t require external power, immediately recognized discs that my older drive just ejected without mounting, and has been ripping BD discs significantly faster than the old drive did.

Amazon had it for $180 from third party sellers, so I ordered from B&H for $135 which included free express shipping.

 

[jcroy]

IIRC the latest versions of libredrive in the makemkv suite, work straight out of the box for many Pioneer bluray/4Kbluray drives without any firmware modifications. Essentially libredrive circumvents a lot of the key revocation stuff of aacs, essentially making it largely drm-free (like dvd).

A very impressive tour-de-force in reverse engineering.

 

[DaveF]

The only reason I don’t do that is because I use Infuse as the client app on my AppleTV, and Infuse doesn’t recognize bonus features. If I used the Plex app that would be the simplest approach.

Does Infuse not recognize alt titles?

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Does Infuse not recognize alt titles?
View attachment 150019

I’m not sure if it currently does - it didn’t at the time I set up my library and I was comfortable with individual entries for different versions so that’s what I went with.

I think I may have had an issue with the way Plex did at the time - it differentiated version by resolution and not content. So for that example of style you showed, it would show two different HD versions but give me no way of telling which was a theatrical cut vs directors cut.

I’m not unhappy with what I wound up with; I get to add a unique poster for each edition and adjust the metadata with details unique to each so it’s ultimately working the way I’d like.

 

[Nelson Au]

FYI, I finally had time today to sort out Close Encounters of the Third Kind and got the 1977, 80 and 98 versions separated. I think it was harder to make sure I had the right version based on their lengths so I could correctly title them. Thanks again for the help!

Josh, glad to hear your new Pioneer drive is working out. I’ll keep that in mind if I want to add an external drive.

 

[Rodney]

My dinosaur drive died a couple days ago, so I went ahead and ordered the Pioneer BD/UHD drive that several people here have spoken favorably about. I’ve been using it for a couple hours and so far I’m very happy. Doesn’t require external power, immediately recognized discs that my older drive just ejected without mounting, and has been ripping BD discs significantly faster than the old drive did.

Late to the game here, but did you try Imprint's Conquest of Space and did the Pioneer drive rip it properly?

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Late to the game here, but did you try Imprint's Conquest of Space and did the Pioneer drive rip it properly?

I didn’t personally, but another forum member who has that drive was kind enough to rip it for me earlier in the year so i didn’t need to try it. However, I had a couple other new discs that my old drive would not rip (behaved the same as Conquest) and the new drive worked on them just fine.

 

[Mark McSherry]

Rodney, see post #680. The UHD Pioneer drive did rip 'Conquest of Space.'

 

[Rodney]

Rodney, see post #680. The UHD Pioneer drive did rip 'Conquest of Space.'

Thank you very much, @Mark McSherry . Based on your post I went ahead and purchased the Pioneer drive. It was delivered today so I tested it out and yes, it did indeed successfully rip the Conquest of Space Imprint blu-ray that my LG UHD drive couldn't. Glad to verify that the disc itself wasn't bad, and now I have two UHD drives to use for ripping.

 

[Mark McSherry]

Thank you very much, @Mark McSherry . Based on your post I went ahead and purchased the Pioneer drive. It was delivered today so I tested it out and yes, it did indeed successfully rip the Conquest of Space Imprint blu-ray that my LG UHD drive couldn't. Glad to verify that the disc itself wasn't bad, and now I have two UHD drives to use for ripping.

Good to hear, Rodney! It never hurts to have a backup drive. I've two Pioneer UHD drives and neither has failed me yet using MakeMKV v1.17.1 win(x64-release).

 

[Citizen87645]

So somewhat related to this topic, I have a Time Machine backup that I noticed was no longer mounting. Couldn't mount it through Disk Utility, and neither disk repair nor erase it to start over. I was all set to send it for warranty replacement, but decided to see if Windows OS could at least erase it, which it did. Once I did that I was able to hook it back up to my Mac, run disk repair, and reformat it to APFS for Time Machine. Most of the time I feel like I'm sort of muddling through this stuff until I find a diagnosis or solution, but my main question is if I was limited to hooking this drive up to a Mac what my options would have been to repair and/or erase it since Disk Utility was doing neither until I used something outside the ecosystem. I know there are a lot of drive tools out there for Mac, but I haven't really considered them as necessary over the years.

 

[Rodney]

Just a warning to the Mac users here who also use a Pioneer UHD drive, don't upgrade to Ventura 13.2. I did and now my Mac isn't able to use the drive. Pioneer is aware of the problem.

Important notice: We have confirmed that our optical drives are not recognized by macOS Ventura 13.2 released by Apple on January 23, 2023. We are currently investigating this symptom. We would like to ask our customers who are using our optical drives to refrain from updating to macOS Ventura 13.2.

 

[Nelson Au]

Thanks Rodney, that’s good to know. My Mac is too old to run Ventura, but when I upgrade, this will be kept in mind.

 

[Nelson Au]

Plex question for Josh and others. I just completed ripping the first season of Space: 1999 from the Via Vision Imprint Ultimate Edition blu ray set. That set orders the episode per production order, but the Movie Database and other online database site shows the series in broadcast order. So that’s how I numbered the episodes.

I found the setting in Plex though to reorder the episodes in production order. I remember Josh mentioning that capability. However, when I select an episode to play, the actually episode is not the one indicated in Plex. So I suspect this function of re-ordering the episodes in Production order did not completely work. Or do I have to do something else? Any insight would be welcome. I could change the setting back to follow the broadcast order and it will be fine again and I just manually select episodes per the order I want to watch. Thanks!

 

[Rodney]

Nelson, the setting doesn't work that way (though it would be cool if it did). The episode ordering setting just tells Plex which list to use, the broadcast order or production order when importing the episode information.

For example if you labelled the shows in production order, episode 2 will be Matter of Life and Death, but if you change the setting in Plex it will label this incorrectly as Force of Life. You need to select the order you labelled the actual episodes, or rename the episodes to fit the new order you selected.

I hope that helps.

 

[Nelson Au]

Thanks Rodney! I think I understand what you’re saying. I was afraid I’d need to re-label the episodes per the order I want it to make the order correct.

 

[Greg.K]

Just a warning to the Mac users here who also use a Pioneer UHD drive, don't upgrade to Ventura 13.2. I did and now my Mac isn't able to use the drive. Pioneer is aware of the problem.

Important notice: We have confirmed that our optical drives are not recognized by macOS Ventura 13.2 released by Apple on January 23, 2023. We are currently investigating this symptom. We would like to ask our customers who are using our optical drives to refrain from updating to macOS Ventura 13.2.

Still on Monterey, here. I guess I'll hold off.

 

[Nelson Au]

Rodney, FYI, I did re-number the Space: 1999 episodes based on the episode numbers used on the DVD and blu rays. Then in Plex, for episode ordering, I used the setting for DVD and now it shows the episodes in production order with the correct episodes. Now I learned a new technique for episode numbering and ordering while doing the rips. Thanks!

Of course this is more manageable for a single or 2 season series as a longer series would be more work to change all the numbers after the fact!

 

[Rodney]

I forgot to come back here and update you guys, but on February 13th I received an email from Apple Feedback regarding the loss of being able to use my Pioneer USB drive after upgrading to 13.2 stating “There are changes in the latest update, build 22D68 (macOS Ventura 13.2.1), that may have resolved this issue.”

Sure enough, that fixed the issue. I am again able to use my drive.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Thanks @Rodney - I’ve been holding off on that upgrade until the issue was resolved.