New Software from DVDfab on downgrading UHD drives... Is this good?

[Billycar11]

Now some Pioneer drives are included also in the current version ....

13.0.6.0 12. May 2026

New: Pioneer Blu-ray drives are now officially supported. 12 popular models from the XD07/XS07/S12/212/211 series offer native UHD Blu-ray support.

New: UHD Drive Tool now supports Pioneer drives and automatically flashes compatible firmware for selected models to enable UHD support.

ehh well we do it for cheaper and were first
support the originals

[zittrig]

Yeah, but I asking myself if they've developed this procedere by their own or perhaps it's copied / stolen from the originals?!

I don't know how difficult this is, even for a expierienced programmer.

[boguslecina]

In my opinion, they’re either reverse-engineering it or developed it themselves. But DVDFab has already been known to use a repackaged version of makemkv, so anything is possible.

[Ezatoka]

In my opinion, they’re either reverse-engineering it or developed it themselves. But DVDFab has already been known to use a repackaged version of makemkv, so anything is possible.

Never heard about that one. Only about viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1514 Leawo BluRay Ripper

[boguslecina]

My mistake. Both companies are from Communist China.

[babayaga]

Yeah, but I asking myself if they've developed this procedere by their own or perhaps it's copied / stolen from the originals?!

I don't know how difficult this is, even for a expierienced programmer.

they might have debugged bdrflash and copied firmware for a while, and they might just possible have done it them self, it's tricky to code for the pioneer drives, but not *that* difficult, but it takes time. DVDFab has been around since 2003, and they do things a bit differently than makemkv, they also have dumping to .iso which is quite useful for many users. I would never pay for their applications, being mostly a piracy tool, dumping streams from many services and so on. I think the developers here at makemkv deserve their some money for their work on the pioneer drives and the makemkv software, it's a lot of hours of work put into it, but i wonder what had happened if c64eva took money for the dvd-drive firmware mods for the xbox 360 drives back in the day..

I have flashed my own drive successfully, but I only got one pioneer drive, I was thinking about releasing the source code, but I'm not going to do that, it's in a grey area, and i don't want to brick anyone's drive. By reading the English in this forum, I don't think makemkv is being developed in the US or the EU... at least I would expect better English from a seasoned programmer..

You can use wireshark to see what the official firmware updater use to flash and read from the drive, and see what CDB commands are being used. Then you can write your own software, that's quite easy. You can also run the firmware updater in x86 assembly, and if you know assembly, it's not that complicated.

[keydb_helper]

By reading the English in this forum, I don't think makemkv is being developed in the US or the EU... at least I would expect better English from a seasoned programmer..

This comment seems a bit unfair considering most of the research and software focused on AACS 1.0/2.0/2.1 was produced by "seasoned programmers" outside of the US and EU.

Mike may not be a native English speaker but he is an effective communicator. I guess when the DVDFab team is your only competition it is easy to seem like William Faulkner...

[babayaga]

By reading the English in this forum, I don't think makemkv is being developed in the US or the EU... at least I would expect better English from a seasoned programmer..

This comment seems a bit unfair considering most of the research and software focused on AACS 1.0/2.0/2.1 was produced by "seasoned programmers" outside of the US and EU.

Mike may not be a native English speaker but he is an effective communicator. I guess when the DVDFab team is your only competition it is easy to seem like William Faulkner...

lål, William Faulkner... Yeah, you got me there! I don't complain that people doesn't write proper English, but the main fact that it's probably not a US product, as many think, that's all

[Coopervid]

babayaga: ...people don't write proper English...

I'm not a native speaker but I lived in the US for 10 years and was shocked how bad their grammar was. I could also name some US folks here on the forum.

Mike Chen is Chinese AFAIK, DVDFab is Chinese and they licecend the UHD part of their software from DeUHD in Russia. The only EU developers were James for AnyDVD and an unknown person who develops XReveal. Both programs relied in the end on the work of Mike Chen to circumvent bus encryption using makemkvcon.

Now this UHD flashing tool they sell must be based on Billy's post 12/22 firmware autoflasher. Just from a timing standpoint as Billy just finished it, logic tells me that.