Is my pioneer BDR-XD05s flashable?

[lizardrobot]

Greetings!

This forum has been extremely helpful in the past. Thank you all for your contributions.

I've discovered from this thread that my BDR-XD05S drive might be flash-able to read UHD discs consistently. I've been able to read some (a German Dune boxset worked fine, for example) but the recent Arrow version of The Andromeda Strain wouldn't read.

One hitch is that I'm Mac-only at home, and I've read that Windows virtual machines won't work for flashing drives. I'm comfortable with the command-line, and have Wine running on my Mac. Is there any hope of flashing my drive without borrowing a Windows PC? I could connect the drive to my Ubuntu home server.

EDIT:

I should post my drive info in case this clarifies things.
I saw instructions in another thread that there are Mac steps for firmware flash, but the Everything Firmware does seem to include Pioneer drives. So I'm confused. Lol. I'll keep reading!

Drive Information
Manufacturer: PIONEER
Product: BD-RW BDR-XD05
Revision: 3.01
Serial number: redacted
Firmware date: 2014-12-26
Bus encryption flags: 1B
Highest AACS version: 81

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

[Coopervid]

Greetings!

This forum has been extremely helpful in the past. Thank you all for your contributions.

I've discovered from this thread that my BDR-XD05S drive might be flash-able to read UHD discs consistently. I've been able to read some (a German Dune boxset worked fine, for example) but the recent Arrow version of The Andromeda Strain wouldn't read.

One hitch is that I'm Mac-only at home, and I've read that Windows virtual machines won't work for flashing drives. I'm comfortable with the command-line, and have Wine running on my Mac. Is there any hope of flashing my drive without borrowing a Windows PC? I could connect the drive to my Ubuntu home server.

EDIT:

I should post my drive info in case this clarifies things.
I saw instructions in another thread that there are Mac steps for firmware flash, but the Everything Firmware does seem to include Pioneer drives. So I'm confused. Lol. I'll keep reading!

Drive Information
Manufacturer: PIONEER
Product: BD-RW BDR-XD05
Revision: 3.01
Serial number: redacted
Firmware date: 2014-12-26
Bus encryption flags: 1B
Highest AACS version: 81

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

You NEED a Windows PC or a good VM with Windows. Parallels or VMWare should do it. PM sent.

[juggling309]

Hi,

I'd love to flash my drive. Would it be possible ?

Drive Information
Manufacturer: PIONEER
Product: BD-RW BDR-XD05
Revision: 3.10
Firmware date: 2017-06-22
Bus encryption flags: 1B
Highest AACS version: 81

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

Best regards.

[Billycar11]

Hi,

I'd love to flash my drive. Would it be possible ?

Drive Information
Manufacturer: PIONEER
Product: BD-RW BDR-XD05
Revision: 3.10
Firmware date: 2017-06-22
Bus encryption flags: 1B
Highest AACS version: 81

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

Best regards.

Yes can be flashed email me that drive info section see below for email

[lizardrobot]

You NEED a Windows PC or a good VM with Windows. Parallels or VMWare should do it. PM sent.

Thanks, @Coopervid, I got your package to work fine! I'm sending a grateful donation your way. (I'm going to send something to @Billycar11 as well, because you both do so much for the community.)

I want to share the steps I took to flash my drive, since I have resolved not to pay for Parallels any more. I believe these should work for all M-series Mac users.

I downloaded UTM, an open-source application for running virtual machines, for free from their website. You can follow their instructions to obtain and install Windows 11 into a UTM virtual machine. This process worked great for me on my M1 MacBook Pro.

Windows 11 does not require a license code to install into the virtual machine, but the terms and conditions require you to activate a license to continue using Windows. You can use an older Win7+ license should you have one, or purchase a license online from Microsoft. Until Windows 11 is licensed some features will be limited, but you can run applications...like the firmware updater.

Once the Win11 VM was running in UTM, I copied to the firmware updater from my thumb drive, extracted the ZIP archive, and flashed my BDR-XD05s. A test run with a UHD 4K blu-ray worked as I hoped.