After years of success, 50% of my discs are failing in the last few months

[Goose]

I've been using MakeMKV for several years and successfully used it with probably 200 discs, with my first "failed to copy" a year ago.

In the last two months, over half of my discs have failed. Sometimes it's the whole disc, sometimes it's just the feature title. Discs that worked fine previously still work (in the limited tests that I've done), using a trial of DVDFab has worked on the discs that have failed in MakeMKV, all of which seems to rule out my drive having issues. But I've run out of trials on DVDFab it's a mediocre comparison to MakeMKV and costs something like $200 for the license so forget that.

I bought Raging Bull direct from Criterion and the feature failed.
Upgraded my Breaking Bad complete series to the blu-ray and half of the discs in there failed (each season is three discs and 1-2 from each season failed.) Washing the discs with dish soap and water fixed the issue for a couple, but not for all of them.
I bought four movies from Arrow video and they all worked great.
This week I bought a handful of films from a thrift store and they all worked fine except for Dances with Wolves, where the supplements have transferred but the feature has stalled and failed on multiple attempts.

Sometimes the disc/title will fail immediately. When the feature film itself fails, it will usually get to a certain point and then hang. No more data is increasing, and the estimate remaining time will continue to increase until it gets over 10 or 20 hours and then give up and declare failure.

I would like to figure out what the problem is, because it seems unlikely that I've just gotten several bad discs after having only one over the course of four years.

I'm running MacOS Monterey 12.4, MakeMKV v.1.17.1, and am using a Pioneer BD drive. The drive information on the main MakeMKV screen is as follows:
Drive Information
OS device name: /dev/rdisk9
Current profile: BD-ROM
Manufacturer: PIONEER
Product: BD-RW BDR-XD05
Revision: 3.01
Serial number:
Firmware date: 2014-12-26
Bus encryption flags: 1B
Highest AACS version: 76

LibreDrive Information
Status: Enabled
Drive platform: RS8231
Firmware name: PIONEER BDR-XD05
Firmware type: Original (unpatched)
Firmware version: 3.01/ID34
DVD all regions: Yes
BD raw data read: Yes
BD raw metadata read: Yes
Unrestricted read speed: Yes

If updating (or reverting to an older version) might help me, please let me know.
Thank you.

[smokeywhitetown]

Is your drive failing, I wonder?

http://www.makemkv.com/errors/read/

[dcoke22]

MacOS Monterey 12.6 is the latest version of macOS, but it probably won't matter in your case.

What might help is to power cycle your drive. I assume your drive is in an external powered enclosure. Sometimes unplugging it, waiting a few seconds, and plugging it back in can help. This effectively reboots the tiny computer that runs the drive's firmware.

Finally, I have three different drives. I find that some discs just don't like some drives. When my main drive won't read a disc, I try it in one of my other drives. Often, but not always, one of my other drives will read the disc just fine. If none of my drives will read the disc, I take the time to clean the disc. Almost always this works. I can recall two instances where a disc had to be replaced, and in both cases the replacement worked.

[smokeywhitetown]

I'm pretty confident your issue is related to a failing BD drive. I've had a similar issue as you have and now that I have a new drive my issue is gone. Next time I'd get a Verbatim drive. This one seems pretty quiet and quick compared to other drives I had before this one (LG, Pioneer). Best of luck.