Disc rips perfectly, but has playback issues

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KoroushGhazi
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Disc rips perfectly, but has playback issues

Post by KoroushGhazi »

I've got a strange issue that's pretty much the reverse of what is commonly reported. In my case, the disc rips perfectly, but has playback issues on the same drive. The drive in question is a recently-purchased Pioneer BDR-S12U, already running the latest firmware from the factory. The discs being used are various retail Blu-rays purchased between 2009 and a few weeks ago. The player used on my PC is the latest version of VLC with no third party mods, and the rips are being created using a licensed copy of MakeMKV 1.63. I originally posted this on my Twitter so apologies if the following doesn't read well:


Got the Die Hard Collection last night for ~$15 (so basically I paid $15 for the Die Hard Blu-ray); put it into my newish Pioneer S12UHT drive. After a while it starts corrupting. Not all that uncommon, right?

Only certain discs start artifacting & always in the same spots, but only on this drive, not on my 2012 BDT500 standalone player. What's weird: aside from no commonality with these "faulty" discs, if I rip the disc with MakeMKV,the resulting file has perfect image quality!

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TL;DR: I honestly can't work out why my drive glitches video playback on some discs, but rips the same disc perfectly to MKV. I know if I contact the retailer or Pioneer it'll have to be physically RMA'd for what seems a software fault.

Image Image
Cheers,
Koroush
Woodstock
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Re: Disc rips perfectly, but has playback issues

Post by Woodstock »

Most likely the disk has areas that are hard to read, but do eventually decode. Playback falters while the drive is trying to read it in "real time".

When playing the MKV, do you have glitches, too, or just when doing a real-time playback?
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KoroushGhazi
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Re: Disc rips perfectly, but has playback issues

Post by KoroushGhazi »

Nope, the rips play back perfectly on the same system. Literally zero glitches. And the discs rip without any sign of encountering errors or hard to read areas (no odd noises, no errors in the log).

So I've reached the point where when I see one of these discs glitch, I just rip it 1:1 and watch the MKV instead, since it only takes about 20 minutes to rip a full movie.

But it is bizarre
Cheers,
Koroush
KoroushGhazi
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Re: Disc rips perfectly, but has playback issues

Post by KoroushGhazi »

An update on this for anyone who may be suffering from the same issue or is just curious.

The problem

To summarise, some retail Blu-rays will not play back properly on my Pioneer BDR-S12U PC drive. They start showing very noticeable glitches a few minutes into the movie. Yet, oddly enough, if I rip that same disc in the same drive on the same PC using MakeMKV, the ripped copy will play back flawlessly everytime.

The BDR-S12U shows no sign of being otherwise faulty, and equally, I haven't had any problems playing the same discs on other players. However, I've now discovered that virtually all of my "faulty" discs are 20th Century Fox branded titles. Some are local Australian editions, many are US versions purchased on Amazon US, some from the UK. Region coding also varies. And the release dates & movies involved vary quite a bit - from the Marilyn Monroe boxed set I bought in 2012, to Avatar 3D which came with my TV, through to Revenge of the Nerds, Die Hard etc.

If anyone knows what specifically is different about all Fox discs, I'm all ears!

The solution:

No real solution so far, because I don't know what aspect of Fox discs is causing this. But this is why I'm grateful for MakeMKV, because I can implement a workaround by simply ripping the relevant Fox Blu-ray and watching the rip - takes about 20 minutes per disc for identical image quality, and zero glitches!
Cheers,
Koroush
thetoad
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Re: Disc rips perfectly, but has playback issues

Post by thetoad »

The BDR-S12U shows no sign of being otherwise faulty, and equally, I haven't had any problems playing the same discs on other players. However, I've now discovered that virtually all of my "faulty" discs are 20th Century Fox branded titles
20th century fox.

sounds like a bd+ issues and your player can't decode bd+ correctly.
KoroushGhazi
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Re: Disc rips perfectly, but has playback issues

Post by KoroushGhazi »

thetoad wrote:
Sat Nov 06, 2021 12:24 pm
20th century fox.

sounds like a bd+ issues and your player can't decode bd+ correctly.
It may well be, but now the drive is well and truly faulty: it's not reading data that it wrote itself to Verbatim BD25s a couple of months ago. It just makes lots of grinding noises, read speeds drop to a few hundred KB/s and eventually it fails to read the file

The data discs are again fine, as I can read them on another drive.

So basically it's an RMA now. When I get it back, or get a new one, I'll retest it to see if the 20th Centry Fox issue remains.


P.S. The Verbatim blanks are these
Image
Cheers,
Koroush
KoroushGhazi
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Re: Disc rips perfectly, but has playback issues

Post by KoroushGhazi »

Update: I finally got my warranty replacement after a couple of months, and it's a brand new BDR S12UHT.

And you guessed it, it still exhibits the issue exactly as described before. So for now, the only workaround I have is still to rip the disc using MakeMKV, then watching the 1:1 copy.

I'm grateful for the existence of MakeMKV, and this is an example of a perfectly legitimate use of this utility and why it's needed.



EDIT: I should clarify that while the replacement player does have the same problem with viewing certain commercial Blu-rays, it doesn't have an issue with reading my data discs, which the old one defintely did. It's also a lot less noisy when reading/writing at high speed and when first detectng disc type.
Cheers,
Koroush
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