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So I purchased a Chinese show in Blu-ray format from China, I had no idea how it was gonna be, just that the box said Blu-ray and DVD so I thought it'd be DVD discs and Blu-rays. I was wrong, it comes in these hybrid discs that are DVD9+BD25 on a single side, so, each disc has two layers of dvd and 1 layer of blu-ray.

The problem is that I can't get my bd drive to read the blu-ray layer at all, just the DVD, I'm using a hacked ps4 with Linux for this, so I'm thinking I should buy a regular Bluray drive and do it on pc like a normal person would, but I asked around and there's no guarantee that buying a bd drive would allow me to access the blu-ray layer at all...

Someone told me that maybe I can get a blu-ray drive that has modified firmwares going around that disable DVD support entirely and that way I could force it to read the blu-ray layer. But i can't find any drive that has custom firmware available anywhere either.
I've also read about LibreDrive and maybe that could help? I have no idea.

Do any of you have any experience with this? Which drive did you get it to work with? I don't mind if it's internal or external, laptop or desktop, I just need one that can read this. Any help is welcomed!

PD: As far as I know, it might not even have any copy protection/region lock, the DVD part that I can access doesn't have any at all which is really weird but convenient tbh.

I've never heard of that; both DVD and blu-ray on different layers of the same side of a disc. I wonder how a player would know which layer play? Perhaps that's the theory behind trying to find a player without the 'red' laser used for DVDs.

I've heard of 'flipper' discs that had a DVD on one side and a blu-ray on the other. The flipper discs quickly gave way to just shoving both a DVD and a blu-ray disc in the same case and aren't very common.

I don't know that a more traditional LibreDrive enabled drive would do any better than your PS4.

I've never heard of that; both DVD and blu-ray on different layers of the same side of a disc. I wonder how a player would know which layer play? Perhaps that's the theory behind trying to find a player without the 'red' laser used for DVDs.

I've heard of 'flipper' discs that had a DVD on one side and a blu-ray on the other. The flipper discs quickly gave way to just shoving both a DVD and a blu-ray disc in the same case and aren't very common.

I don't know that a more traditional LibreDrive enabled drive would do any better than your PS4.

thanks for your reply, I was talking about single-sided hybrid discs, I've found some forum posts about this on different sites and yeah basically is finding a drive that uses the blue laser first. but either way, this turned out to be a bootleg and was just a DVD but I was able to get a refund

Just in case it helps anyone, it was for a Chinese show named Hello, AnYi or 你好，安怡. There are no official home video releases and the only ones are bootlegs mislabeled as Blu-ray/DVD9 but are just DVD9 and are the webrips put on disc with incorrect video regioning and framerate and still have hardsubs so very useless.

I've purchased a handful of those bootleg Chinese titles myself but they've all been 'burnt' BD-R discs... and they're not particularly reliable, at least in my drive.

As you say, they mostly seem to be webrips from the various streaming services (Disney, Paramount, Netflix, etc.), who unfortunately don't release these titles on disc themselves. And I'm almost always disappointed with the content (lower resolution, missing episodes/extras, hard-coded subs, and so on).

I'd gladly pay extra for a 'genuine' item, but they're just not available anywhere else.

You can do everything as NTFS and use Webman to copy the dumps over. Webman will read NTFS drives and will copy files over. It’s just going to take you a few minutes to figure out the Webman interface.