No video output from USB drive after Makemkv opens disc

[TheCrazyCanuck]

I have a machine with a mix of 4 LG and ASUS Blu ray drives and one Pioneer BDR-XD07-UHD USB external drive. Makemkv works fine on all the drives but recently I'm noticing on the external Pioneer drive I cannot play back video from that drive after Makemkv opens it. Basically I'm trying to play the disc in PowerDVD after ripping so that I can figure out which episode is which and name them accordingly. But for some reason I get no video output in PowerDVD when I attempt to open a disc in the Pioneer drive after ripping it (other drives handle this fine). To get the drive working again I close the Makemkv instance that had the drive open and close Powerdvd, unplug the drive, plug it back in, open disc in PowerDVD and it works.

I'm not sure if I'm debugging a software library issue or if the drive is going into a powered down state preventing playback so if anyone else has come across this and has any pointers I'm all ears. This might have started with the latest version of Makemkv that I installed recently because this used to work fine and only started happening recently.

[MartyMcNuts]

I have a machine with a mix of 4 LG and ASUS Blu ray drives and one Pioneer BDR-XD07-UHD USB external drive. Makemkv works fine on all the drives but recently I'm noticing on the external Pioneer drive I cannot play back video from that drive after Makemkv opens it. Basically I'm trying to play the disc in PowerDVD after ripping so that I can figure out which episode is which and name them accordingly. But for some reason I get no video output in PowerDVD when I attempt to open a disc in the Pioneer drive after ripping it (other drives handle this fine). To get the drive working again I close the Makemkv instance that had the drive open and close Powerdvd, unplug the drive, plug it back in, open disc in PowerDVD and it works.

I'm not sure if I'm debugging a software library issue or if the drive is going into a powered down state preventing playback so if anyone else has come across this and has any pointers I'm all ears. This might have started with the latest version of Makemkv that I installed recently because this used to work fine and only started happening recently.

To playback using PowerDVD your PC must meet it's very stringent requirements. Far easier to use any other player, such as VLC, MPC-HC etc as there are no specific playback requirements.

[TheCrazyCanuck]

What I mean is this always worked before and recently after Makemkv opens the disc the drive no longer can play back. So if I just boot up and open the disc in PowerDVD no problem, it's the additional step of opening the disc with Makemkv that is for whatever reason preventing PowerDVD from playing it back. The next time this happens I'll give MPC-BE a go to see if it's just PowerDVD affected or not, but I've been using Makemkv for over a decade and haven't seen this issue until the last ~2 weeks roughly so I'm wondering if the drive is being left in an unexpected state. I don't think ripping the disc is required to reproduce it on my system, I think I saw it happen simply by having Makemkv open the disc so maybe it's that library used to raw access the disc changed something.

[MartyMcNuts]

What I mean is this always worked before and recently after Makemkv opens the disc the drive no longer can play back. So if I just boot up and open the disc in PowerDVD no problem, it's the additional step of opening the disc with Makemkv that is for whatever reason preventing PowerDVD from playing it back. The next time this happens I'll give MPC-BE a go to see if it's just PowerDVD affected or not, but I've been using Makemkv for over a decade and haven't seen this issue until the last ~2 weeks roughly so I'm wondering if the drive is being left in an unexpected state. I don't think ripping the disc is required to reproduce it on my system, I think I saw it happen simply by having Makemkv open the disc so maybe it's that library used to raw access the disc changed something.

That is because MakeMKV enabled LibreDrive on your Pioneer. It stays enabled until the drive is rebooted. Being official playback software, PowerDVD won't work with LibreDrive enabled.

[TheCrazyCanuck]

I was suspecting that but didn't know how LibreDrive works so that answers a bunch of other questions I had coming The strange thing is this only started happening recently so maybe it wasn't enforced previously. The drive is plugged into the front of my computer so this is no biggie.

Hopefully my stack of 5.25" Pioneer drives in Vantec enclosures doesn't run into the same thing. Then again I'm lazy enough to just reboot the machine given I'm amortizing my ripping time across 8 drives

[MartyMcNuts]

I was suspecting that but didn't know how LibreDrive works so that answers a bunch of other questions I had coming The strange thing is this only started happening recently so maybe it wasn't enforced previously. The drive is plugged into the front of my computer so this is no biggie.

Hopefully my stack of 5.25" Pioneer drives in Vantec enclosures doesn't run into the same thing. Then again I'm lazy enough to just reboot the machine given I'm amortizing my ripping time across 8 drives

As far as your 5.25" drives go, they should not work with PowerDVD at all unless they are official UHD drive models, such as WH16NS60 or Pioneer BDR-S12UHT and other Pioneer UHD models.

As I said before, it would probably be easier to just use a non-official player. No need to worry about rebooting PC or drives etc.

[TheCrazyCanuck]

Thanks for the suggestion! In the past trying to get other players working didn't pan out much but since I don't like using PowerDVD I gave VLC another try and that was fairly easy to get it working this time around. Now I should be able to remote into my ripping machine and not worry about HDCP getting in the way which will be a nice little bonus of switching to VLC.