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Hello there, pretty new here and to the world of MakeMKV. I recently purchased an LG WH14NS40 and have been using it to rip Blu-Rays and DVDs. I have not flashed it yet to do UHD or 4K as I am still new and haven't had the time to read through all of the documentation.

My concern is regarding the DVDs that I have worked on are usually taking 15 - 20 min to get through at a rate of 4X max. I thought this player would read them faster as it is advertised to be 16X. I was wondering if there are any settings I need to change.

With the research I have done it seems that read speeds can be due to the disc itself, the drive being riplocked, or settings in MakeMKV itself. I am not sure which of these options is the perpetrator. The discs I have been working with are either very clean or brand new so I am leaning away from the disc being the lower read speed. In terms of the drive being riplocked, I am unsure based on all the forum posts I have read if this drive is riplocked.

Will flashing the drive for UHD 4K help speed up the disc and bypass a possible riplock to read faster?

Thank you in advance.

Updating the firmware will do nothing to speed up DVD reading. It uses a different laser than BD or UHD, so it doesn't affect it.

I should qualify that - if you're seeing riplock with the original firmware (rare!), the new firmware could disable it. But riplock would lock your speed to 2x, not allow you to go faster. And 16x speeds will only occasionally appear, because they're limited to when the disk hits the outer diameter, not the inner part of the disk. And disks start on the inside.

MakeMKV supports using more than one optical drive at the same time. In the preferences, there's an option to 'Ask for single drive mode'. With that turned on, if there's more than one optical drive, when MakeMKV is started, it'll ask you which optical drive to 'lock' that instance of MakeMKV to. A second instance of MakeMKV can be started and 'locked' to the other optical drive and two discs can be ripped independently.

This is often a better way to increase the effective disc rip rate.

This may be relevant viewtopic.php?p=139366#p139366

Basically the highest average read speed you can expect is about 12MB/sec which is obviously quite slow, so I would agree with dcoke22 that multiple drives is the way to go. I'd recommend Asus DRW-24D5MT (around $30 USD) as its read speeds are consistently good for me - most discs I do get 12MB/sec on, but I do give them a quick spray n wipe with isopropyl alcohol first. Whereas my Liteon drive is picky and will only give me top speed when the disc is absolutely perfect which is often not the case. So with 2 Asus drives I think you could expect to do 2 discs in 11 minutes most of the time. I'm considering replacing my Liteon with another Asus.