OWC Mercury Pro 16X Super-Multi Blu-ray/DVD/CD Burner Flashing

[JoseBandito]

I purchased the top of the line OWC optical drive in November of 2022: OWC Mercury Pro 16X Super-Multi Blu-ray/DVD/CD Burner/Reader External Optical Drive with M-DISC & BDXL Support. In general the drive has been working great and I would recommend it.

I am running Sequoia 15.2 on an M2 Pro Mac Mini. I have Mac MakeMKV 1.17.8 installed.

The drive works with non-UHD bluray disks fine. Just backed up my bluray copy of Avatar for example and it plays back great using Plex on my Apple TV’s.

As I am now picking up more UHD disks, I want to look into the possibility of flashing the firmware on the optical drive.

The Apple System Report provides this info on the drive:

HL-DT-ST BD-RE BH16NS40:

Firmware Revision: 1.05
Interconnect: USB
Burn Support: Yes (Generic Drive Support)
Profile Path: None
Cache: 4064 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -R DL, -RAM, -RW, +R, +R DL, +RW
BD-Write: -R, -RE
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw, DVD-DAO

The info box in MakMKV provides this info:

Drive Information:
Manufacturer:
HL-DT-ST
Product: BD-RE BH16NS40

Revision: 1.05

Serial number: ...

Firmware date: 2120-05-06 13:31

Bus encryption flags: 17

Highest AACS version: 16


LibreDrive Information:

Status: Possible (with patched firmware)
Drive platform: MT1959

Harware support: Yes

Firmware support: No

Firmware type: Original (patched version available)

Firmware version: 1.05

DVD all regions: Possible (with patched firmware)

BD raw data read: Possible (with patched firmware)
BD raw metadata read: Possible (with patched firmware)

Unrestricted read speed: Possible (with patched firmware)

As the Status is shown Possible (with patched firmware) and the Drive platform is listed as MT1959, flashing appears to be possible.

I do NOT want to brick my expensive OWC optical drive however so I proceed with caution and wish to ask if anyone has successfully flashed this specific drive to support LibreDrive. Any savvy advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks to all for any warm fuzzies you can give me. ; )

And Merry Christmas too!

[Billycar11]

See guide below