www.makemkv.com

So I'm now up to five 4K UHD discs and I've really had mixed results and am somewhat discouraged. I'd love to know what's going on. I work in the IT field and usually can identify the issue but so far there's no smoking gun. Here's my complete system specs and results.

Bluray Drive: Asus BW-16D1HT firmware version 3.0
PC: HP Z820 with Dual 3.07 X5675 Processors with 6 Cores each for a total of 12
GPU: NVIDIA Quadro 5000
Hard Drive: LSI Mega raid 15,000 RPM drives. Raid 5 with 3 discs
Network Speed: 1Gb
TV: LG OLED 55B7A
Streaming: Universal Media Server directly to LG TV with WebOS 3.5

I started with Deadpool and it worked absolutely beautifully. No streaming problems. It streamed to my LG TV using Universal Media Server without one problem. I've tried it over and over and have no issues. Next was The Last Witch Hunter. When I first put the disc in I received this error in MakeMKV after about 30 seconds.

MakeMKV v1.12.0 win(x64-release) started
Error 'Scsi error - HARDWARE ERROR:TIMEOUT ON LOGICAL UNIT' occurred while reading 'BD-RE ASUS BW-16D1HT 3.00' at offset '524288'

I did a reboot and tried the disc again and it seemed to rip fine. But there are about 6 quick stutter points before the opening Title Sequence that seem to be in the same spot on each successive playthrough. After that though it streams fine to the end.

Next up was The Great Wall. It ripped fine. Occasionally there is what looks like macro blocking on scene changes. They look like digital hits that seem like MakeMKV wasn't able to get all the information off the disc.

The last one I did was Transformers the Last Knight and again no issues. It plays fine.

Are 4K UHD discs just extremely touchy? Do the keys not work completely? Are the discs junk and the drive isn't able to read it correctly? I don't think it's a drive issue since I've had perfect success with some discs. I've even tried to rip discs a second time thinking that on a second go round I might get a different result but I get the same result. To me that points towards disc issues but I'm not really sure. I have a lot of Blurays and I don't have any issues with any of them. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Short answers, and I'm sure others will chime in as well.

If it rips fine then there is no disc or drive or MakeMKV issue.

Macroblocking is almost certainly related to playback software or hardware.

Stutter is hardware related. Depending on your playback software or hardware, you can monitor the changing video bitrate during playback. My guess is a spike in bitrate during opening logos, as I've seen that before myself.

For playback try the new VLC 3.0, it supports up to 8K HDR hardware playback, this should solve your playback problems.

Can the LG TV's use the VLC 3.0?

tvguy7 wrote:Can the LG TV's use the VLC 3.0?

I am assuming your LG is a smart tv so I would recommend using Plex on the tv and set up Plex on your computer to act as the server. That is what I am doing and it works great. It will give you a lot more info and special features with each movie and that can be kind of cool. I do this with both a Sony 4K TV and a 1080p LG tv. I also do it with a Roku box in my office. Feel free to ask any questions.

dazbobaby wrote:For playback try the new VLC 3.0, it supports up to 8K HDR hardware playback, this should solve your playback problems.

VLC 3.0 still can't playback as well as MPV. I tried it on my first gen Surface Book (with 6th gen i5) and it couldn't play a reduced bitrate 4K rip smoothly. So far only MPV and MPC works.

I gave up on VLC a while ago.

tvguy7 wrote:So I'm now up to five 4K UHD discs and I've really had mixed results and am somewhat discouraged. I'd love to know what's going on. I work in the IT field and usually can identify the issue but so far there's no smoking gun. Here's my complete system specs and results.

Bluray Drive: Asus BW-16D1HT firmware version 3.0
PC: HP Z820 with Dual 3.07 X5675 Processors with 6 Cores each for a total of 12
GPU: NVIDIA Quadro 5000
Hard Drive: LSI Mega raid 15,000 RPM drives. Raid 5 with 3 discs
Network Speed: 1Gb
TV: LG OLED 55B7A
Streaming: Universal Media Server directly to LG TV with WebOS 3.5

Any feedback would be appreciated.

How much memory on your server? I know with FreeNAS that memory is important and the more the better but I don't know about your server operating system. Just a thought but it could come into play.

An update that I've resolved my issues and hopefully this info could be useful for others in the future.

I used a few network resource tools and determined that even with my network at 1GB, a few of the titles were pushing up against that limit. Using the full file of The Last Witch Hunter the bit rate is 65Mbps. I used a nightly version of handbrake to get a 10bit HDR version of the file and reduce the bit rate and it played fine from that point on.

To the poster who recommended Plex, the last I checked Plex did not support HDR.