There are some other options but I haven't experimented with them. I strongly prefer ripping my stuff and not dealing with the discs again.

Thanks for watching! Glad you enjoyed the video! 👍

I'm glad you enjoyed it. 👍

Agreed. I wasn't trying to hide the ball there or anything. 😅 The bit of trouble you do get into with Blu-rays and 4K Blu-rays is that are constructed different, so you can't just polish out scratches anymore. Or at least I haven't had any success doing it. CDs and DVDs you can.

It's a drive I put in an external enclosure. There are links in the video description for all of the parts as well as a video about the enclosure itself.

Frustratingly, installing it is now dead simple. It takes all of 15 minutes. Then comes the next several hours of attempting to get your privacy back.

Glad I could help! 👍

Straight ISO in VLC is all I'm doing for the moment.

@@TheBrokenTech I use Handbrake to transcode the files to .h265. Muuuch smaller sizes for about the same quality, imho

Hard drives get bigger and cheaper all the time and I don't want to rip this stuff again later like I _should_ with my music collection. 😂

@@TheBrokenTech I mean, you should be able to use the rips that you already have. No need to pull out the discs again. I have a NAS with 8 gigs which is half full with all the movies and TV shows I own. If I was just straight ripping the discs, I'd be out of space ages ago. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

@@FunkatronicGeek I mean later on I don't want to re-rip them to get the quality back. I think I have something like 300TB on-hand, so, I can make it work for awhile.

Most likely so. The good news is that new drives are pretty affordable.

@@TheBrokenTech I know I'm getting picky, but I have scoured the internet looking for an internal 4K Writer and I don't think they make them. I'd love a link if they are available.

@@kd2mill "4K UHD Blu-ray" is a data format. The media format you would use to burn one is BDXL, which I think every drive of this class supports these days. However, BDXL media is extremely expensive and the discs are hard to master (meaning fairly high failure rates). Because of that, I've never burned one. I suggest that you're better off keeping your data on HDDs or USB sticks or whatever works best for your situation.

The best thing to do is rip the discs and play the files.

Right now the LG drives are only about 60 bucks and LG just discontinued all of their set-top players. If you actually use your drive for 4K, you may consider getting a spare to have around. I've also run into many discs where one drive of mine would read it while another would not, with no rhyme or reason, so having a few drives around never hurts.

@@TheBrokenTech Probably what I'll do. I'm using and LG UH12NS40 and it reads most anything I throw at it. I'm not picky with HD vs UHD and I don't actually have anything that can display 4k but I have a few UHD discs lying around that I've ripped for my Plex setup

@@FunkatronicGeek IMO, HD vs. UHD doesn't really pay off until you get into screen sizes over 75" _or_ the new 4K scan of the source material is a big upgrade for some reason. Regular HD blu-rays are a lot more forgiving to read than than UHD discs. So... if you're not likely to ever be in the 4K camp, you'll prob ably have a pretty simple time with your stuff.

I say pretty much exactly all of that in the video I made about playback, which you will find linked in the pinned comment.

I'm not aware of any support for Sony drives. 😔

@@TheBrokenTech Thanks for the information. Have a good New Year!

There's more to it than just money. In reality I've paid about $100 for each of my last official 4K and unofficial drives. There was no cost advantage either way. -Official 4K drives are getting hard to find for sale in the US. They have all pretty much evaporated outside of some slimline models (most commonly, the LG BU40N). -Official 4K drives can only be used with officially supported hardware for 4K discs. That means Intel processors from 6th-10th generation, Windows 10 and PowerDVD for playback. Nothing else is officially supported. So if you buy an official drive, that's what you're stuck with. Microsoft and PowerDVD also technically no longer support UHD playback and blame it on Intel. Intel blames it on hardware vendors. Anyhow... It's all more nuanced than that, but, that's the nutshell version. So... No matter how much you spend, if you buy an official drive you're stuck with those limitations unless there happens to be an _unofficial_ firmware for it (as is the case with the BU40N), which then turns your official drive into the same thing as any other unofficial drive. Official 4K drives are actually _less_ capable than their unofficial counterparts due to the hardware DRM requirements. I'd pay _more_ money for an unofficial drive for that reason. It just happens that you can get them pretty cheap anyhow.

You're very welcome. Happy New Year! 👍

Yes, that is what I'm saying.

@ How is possible? Unless you are talking about BDXL drives which are capable of reading 100GB BD-R’s. BDXL drive are not normal Blu-ray drives.

@@Capturing-MemoriesThese drives are also BDXL capable.

@@TheBrokenTech Yes, that's the requirement I believe.

@@Capturing-Memories I think about every drive made in the last decade supports BDXL media, but there are other factors as well. In reality, there are only about 3 drives left on the market where this trick works (and I think 2 of them are linked in the description).

I would guess it's pretty close as far as location, but the components themselves are all different at this point.

Unfortunately the simple way to do that doesn't really exist and I would argue that it never really did. 4K discs are tricky even in the best circumstances. That's why I suggest that you backup your collection instead. That said, VLC has a lot of volume control settings and you can run Equalizer APO (I suggest also adding the "Peace" front end for it) to add even more flexibility. I will likely cover all of that in an HTPC setup video at some point in the future.

Yep... One is none when it comes to data backups. I've been there. 😔

HDR is an independent functional of anything VLC or MakeMKV does. Windows 10/11 supports HDR and will pass it right along if the rest of the hardware supports it. I don't know anything about your particular model of TV though...

Yep, I was there for all of that as well. 😂 I never went down the Commodore road though. We had a TI in the '80s and then moved straight into PCs around 1990.

I don't know if there were rail kits for them back when I bought mine. That sounds like a good idea.

That exact thing has already happened on several services. Music rights agreements have also been challenged so the movies get re-edited to change that, or social mores change and movies get re-edited to reflect modern times, or a bunch of other terrible things... It's just another situation of where I'd rather be looking _at it_ than looking _for it._ The 0s and 1s on the disc aren't going to be changing any time soon.

😆

That is very much what the entire industry has been trying to do ever since then, including Sony. Many blu-rays even have special Playstation 3 specific DRM that Sony was trying to push into the world.

I think that's the general idea. I think the _MK firmwares do a few other things too.

I believe the firmware flash fixes that too. I've never experienced it on any of my drives.

I have an entire video about playback. It's in the linked comment. That said, AnyDVD is now defunct.

I don't have any experience with it, and because of how it's distributed, I can't cover it on the channel.

@@TheBrokenTech Thanks for the reply

You used to be able to use AnyDVD to do that, but AnyDVD has disappeared from the world...

Yes.

The picture I'm talking about in this video is served to you by Microsoft. If you're seeing something that is familiar to you on a personal basis, it's probably coming from something else.

Dang! You shoulda grabbed one for me too! I'm good for it. I swear! 😂 I'm glad I could help! 👍

Ironically, I also own a TE01 and have a video about putting an optical drive in one. It's not recommended. 😂

@@TheBrokenTech That was the first video I saw of yours. Thanks again.

Glad I could help! 👍

I'm sorry to hear that. Even when I've made mistakes, the software stopped me from doing anything horrible.

@@TheBrokenTech Don't feel bad, it's not _your_ fault. I must've flashed the wrong file, i don't remember the specifics.

@@bjornroesbeke That's what I'm saying. I have accidentally tried to flash the wrong file and the software stopped me. It sounds like I was lucky!

It does if you don't internet connect it first. Once you do internet connect it, it gets a little more tricky to work around. Turn your router off and start again.

I think one of the last ones I got was a Narwhal, which was also one of the least offensive things they pumped into my desktop. 😂 Glad I could help! 👍

Thanks for watching! 👍

I would argue that there are advancements along the chain of technology you've outlined, and that's why they went into the past, rather than just blatant consumerism. If we were only interest in drilling down to the highest value, I suppose we'd all be reading donated books by moonlight. 😉

@TheBrokenTech If you don't mind being a test for currency separation ? Have at it ! I'm stopping at CDs & Vinyl I don't care what some kid comes up with next ?

@@ernestporee3697 Cool story. 😂

@@TheBrokenTech Do you have a CD Collection ? A record collection ? a DVD collection ? VHS collection ? I live in New York City and all these things are garbage now! Not because of what they are but because they are discarded by people who are fed up with the bullshit ! Blue Ray movies $2.00 CDs 50. Cent to a dollar ? Records samething 50. Or a dollar ? Not to mention people just making space and giving them away ! Drilling candle light stories can't account for such waste and abandonment And cost !

@@ernestporee3697 ...you must be fun at parties.

Thanks! I linked the LG in the video description (though they do go in and out of stock), I've flashed about a dozen of these at this point and I've never had any trouble (and flashing is only required to unlock 4K discs), and unfortunately AnyDVD is now defunct... 😔

Ha! I can understand that. Unfortunately AnyDVD is now defunct. So... 😔

I don't believe that Pioneer drives can be flashed any longer by conventional means. There are some people selling them pre-flashed for hundreds of dollars, but I don't personally think that's a good value when the LGs are 60 bucks most days.

I quite suspect the GUIFlasher would work all the way back to XP. I may try that next time. 😂

Hummmmm... That *is* interesting. There's a thread titled "SDFtool Flasher" from 2020, started by Marty, that has a mediafire link for the version I'd expect to find. Hopefully there's nothing serious going on?

@@TheBrokenTech Big help! I had gone through the main thread for UHD drives on the main forum page and what I downloaded was not the same as what you just told me about. I searched for your recommended thread, found it, downloaded it from there, and it looks just like what is shown in your video. I have an LG WH16NS40 with firmware 1.05 I am planning to flash using the DE_LG_WH16NS60_1.02_MK.bin. I appreciate the help!

That's also what I found. I have no idea what's going on over there. Glad I could help!

@@TheBrokenTech Looking at the FW dump that I pulled from the drive before doing any flashing. How do you use the dump file if you would like to recover it to the original FW at some point in the future? It's a .tar compressed file, the SDFTool looks for a bin. I looked inside the backup and all the files are small, like 69k max, nowhere near the 2meg size of the MK.bin files.

@@Firewireman1 I discovered the same things you did _after_ I recorded this video. 😂 I honestly do not know what that backup file is or what it's used for.

Glad I could help! 👍

I believe there are Linux utilities for it.