www.makemkv.com

Hello forum, Ive been reading the forum for a while but this is my first post. I recently ran into an error that I wanted to discuss that I believe runs contrary to the previous discussion but first some backstory.

backstory: After having a few amazon kindle titles vanish from my kindle, that I paid money for, due to some amazon->author pissing match I realized that my digital copies on Vudu/Movies Anywhere/Amazon Video were not as safe as I would like. So I have embarked on ripping my entire video collection to streaming format to place on my Plex server. First using MakeMKV to rip the feature film and then Handbrake to process the video into h.264/h.265 format for smaller file size. I have over 400 Blueray, 75 DVD that werent replaced by Bluray, and maybe 12 UHD discs. So far I have ripped 283 of the titles not including entire complete series of TV shows like Clone Wars, Firefly, Avatar the Last Airbender, and Farscape. I have been doing this since mid June now keeping my device running from around 8am to around 10pm non-stop.

So I have now had this issue of a track following error 3 times now, spaced waaaay far apart. Like I could rip another 75 discs before this appears again. But there is a trend that simply cannot be ignored because I simply do not believe in coincidences. Here are the common trends

1. All 3 discs are a DREAMWORKS Animation blu-ray (The Croods, Home, Megamind)
2. all 3 disc are pristinely clean with no scratches no smudges. We're talking mirror polish here, one was never even played before
3. All 3 discs play fine on my PS5, PS4, and Sony BD player
4. All 3 discs I limited the rip to the bare essentials (just the main feature mpls title, no subtitles, and just the 1 lossless audio track like TrueHD or DTS-HD MA so I can reprocess that later as 640k AC3 or 1536k E-AC3)
5. In every case the segment map is a single segment of the entire movie
6. In every case I encounter this error right around the 50% point of that m2ts file
7. In every case repeated tries results in error at the same spot
8. In every case I can browse in windows file explorer to the /BDMV/STREAM/xxxxx.m2ts and copy that encrypted file to my computer storage. However, when it gets to the 50% mark the xfer rate drops from 7MB/sec to around 1MB/sec for about 5 min before resuming

I tried searching the forums for the instructions that the http://www.makemkv.com/errors/read/ article claims exists about copying files outside makemkv, but nothing can be found. Online articles elsewhere suggest I should be able to directly open the m2ts file in makemkv but that also does not appear to be the case; maybe it used to but now the file is filtered out when trying to open a file.

Based on a lot of experimentation I think I can safely say that the discs are not injured or defective. I can also say that given my blu-ray drive seems to work on ever title that ISNT these 3 Dreamworks Animation titles I think we can rule out a 'failing drive'. I can entertain the possibility that maybe a higher end drive might be needed for some Dreakworks titles (actually had no problem with my 3 Madagascar movies and the 1 Penguins movie). However the fact that the drive itself could read this portion of the disc at slower speeds may indicate that its only when trying to rip at the full 6x speed thats the problem.

One comment that I read in my investigation was someone suggesting copy protection does not include hardware read errors. Whoever said that must be a Millenial or GenZ. Any GenX worth his/her Salt remembers that the original copy protection in the old Infocom games (zork etc) deliberately put errors on the disc to circumvent the C:\>copy.exe command. Hence how the utility diskcopy.exe evolved in order to copy everything including sector errors.

Given that the only way to repeat this bug is with these specific dreaworks titles and only with makemkv, Is it not possible that Dreamworks Studio engineered a disc that plays perfectly fine in a regular player at 1x speeds but somehow fails at higher speeds? Could they not have altered the geometry of that portion of the disc to have narrower lands and dots to make reading at faster speeds extremely difficult?

I'm speculating here. Most discs are multilayer discs. Blu-rays are commonly 2-layer discs. The read head starts on the inner ring, reads the spiral of data to the outer edge, transitions to the second layer, the reads the spiral on the second layer back towards the middle. The second (or third) layer on an optical disc is physically at a different depth than the first layer.

The transition between layers is historically a problematic moment for optical disc reading. MakeMKV generally slows the read rate to improve the chances of correctly reading across the transition.

It is possible that the discs that have failed for you would work correctly on a different optical drive. Personally, I have 3 different optical drives. Often, but not always, when a disc doesn't work in my main drive, it works just fine in one of my other drives. If it doesn't work in any drive, after a cleaning, sometimes the disc will work.

Speaking of cleaning, a brand-new-in-package disc is no guarantee of a clean disc. I've had to clean brand new discs to get them to work. Sometimes they have a film left on them from the manufacturing process. Or sometimes they have deposits from the off-gassing of the plastic case.

I think that your failing discs are all Dreamworks discs is coincidental. That they all fail at roughly the 50% point suggests trouble with the layer transition.

I think that your failing discs are all Dreamworks discs is coincidental. That they all fail at roughly the 50% point suggests trouble with the layer transition.

Thats an interesting theory. I assume being on other layers goes beyond mere filesize. I have ripped some really large files in the 36+ Gig range, 3hr movies, etc. Is it the single segment nature that would cause the problem where multi-segment playlists dont have the same issue transitioning? Im doing this from a laptop so external drives are mandatory. I did not invest heavily in a BD burner since I only needed to read not write. So I went searching for a BD-Rom drive instead. I stumbled onto a drive on Amazon, its one of those made in china, branded by some bs product name. The device brand is Yaeonku and its about a $35 drive. With the exception of these 3 disks I cant complain too much. Its been a workhorse on all the other 270+ BD I have ripped. It totally sucks with DVD. For DVD I am using the ASUS ZenDrive 08U9M. In typical chinese-copy fashion, their device identifies itself as hp.

Drive Information
OS device name: \Device\CdRom0
Current profile: BD-ROM
Manufacturer: hp
Product: BD CMB UJ160
Revision: 1.00
Serial number: WN32 017017
Bus encryption flags: 1B
Highest AACS version: 75

Im still on the fence if I want to spend $100 on the LG BP60NB10. I dont have that much UHD and the file sizes would be insane not to mention the handbrake processing time. What normally takes 45min - 1hr using the Fast 1080p preset with a couple modifications, simply changing it to x265 with the exact same settings turns into a 4-5hr ordeal on just regular blu-ray rips. All my UHD titles come with blu-ray copies as well so I can always just rip those.

The good news about these 3 titles are that they are animations. So ripping the DVD thats bundled with them, and running handbrake with a modified HQ 480p preset will result in a similar filesize and similar end product bitrate that the TV upscales really well (all my DVD discs bundled with my blu-ray tend to respect the same aspect ration, none of that full frame crap).

I'm experiencing the same error with BR 'World war Z'. I was also looking for the encrypted copy post in the forums, but not having much luck. If anyone is aware of the post can the send a link?