Ejecting Disks is Very Unpredictable

[quesadilla5]

I have a Mac Pro with one internal blur ray player, Pioneer BDR-207D, and an external blu ray player, an Optiarc BD ROM BC-5500S.

When MakeMKV completes a rip, it throws up the notification dialogue, when you press 'OK', it acts like it's scanning the disc although the drive isn't active or spinning, a timer starts, and the timer increases second by second, and I think it would just go on forever if I allowed it to.

If I press the keyboard button, nothing happens. If I press the eject button on either drive, nothing happens. If I press the eject button in the Finder or in the toolbar, Finder will crash, once it crashes, it will try to restart, but it will simply hang.

One work-around I've noticed that works is to have Disk Utility open the entire time, and usually pressing eject there will eject the disk, but that doesn't always work.

*Sometimes* if you press 'OK' on the dialogue after the rip completes and you press the eject button in the toolbar of the MakeMKV program, it will work, it will eject the disc and it won't do the weird count up to infinity thing I described.

Otherwise, if a disc won't eject, the only thing that works is rebooting. Rebooting. Rebooting. There is a lot of rebooting!

Is there anything I can do differently? Is this a bug?

I'm running OSX Mountain Lion 10.8.1.

Thanks!

[Gadgetman!]

I've seen the same problem with DVDs.

Do you have any other program running that might be attempting to access the drive?
(iTunes, maybe?)
Or running another copy of MakeMKV?
(At most I had 5 DVD-drives and 3 instances of MakeMKV on my Mac Mini, and this problem showed up quite often.)

[quesadilla5]

I do have iTunes running, this is our media server, so it's almost always running. I usually also have handbrake running.

[Gadgetman!]

Handbrake doesn't 'touch' your drives unless you select it as a source, so that's not the problem.

Try working without iTunes for a while.

[quesadilla5]

Are you serious, don't use iTunes?

I don't have this problem with any other software. And in fact I'm not even sure it is makemkv,
it might also be OS. Because an empty drive with nothing in it will refuse to open with the eject key and I have to reboot again. Maybe I just made a bad buying buying choice with regards to the drive. I don't think it has anything to do with iTunes though.

It locks up a process internally, I'm trying to figure out which it is so I don't have to do a complete reboot every time. If I don't reboot immediately Finder stops responding right away and crashes and eventually takes down the whole system. Relaunching Finder does not work, that just hangs too.

[Gadgetman!]

Stopping iTunes while you test is so that we can exclude that as a cause.
(I don't really think iTunes is the cause, either. I just like to be certain.)

If it hangs with one BD, could you try to see if that also happens if you rip the same BD in the other drive, or if you rip it again in the same drive?
(After a reboot, probably... )

As I wrote earlier, I had some of the same problems, while working through my DVDs, but with me running with up to 5 drives it wasn't that much of a hindrance for me, so I never bothered to really investigate it. (5 drives, up to 3 instances of MakeMKV. That way I could have a new DVD ready in another drive and point an instance towards it as soon as it finished with another. And if one happened to hang... so what? I had 4 more... And if you were daring you could unplug a USB-drive... )
I must mention that I usually used the finder to eject DVDs instead of the MakeMKV eject function, though. That may be a bit more stable?
All DVD ejects/inserts happened while MakeMKV was busy doing what it was designed to do; ripping movies.

And yes, it was hectic, but I only had 4 or 5 hours every evening, and maybe a half-hour slot in the morning on workdays, to rip as many DVDs as possible so that I always had new content to add to the HandBrake queue. (I'm running with an old 2005 Mini which - while upgraded to 2GB RAM, SSD drive and 2.16GHz C2D CPU - isn't the leader of the pack in conversions, so it needed to run at all times, even when I was asleep, at work, asleep at work, or off travelling)

I can't remember exactly, but I think I had lockups on all the drives at different times:
The Internal Superdrive
The 2 Cheap-ass USB drives (LG)
the borrowed HP USB-drive (belongs to a HP Laptop) and even
Old Spitefiul; an IDE-based half-height DVD-reader connected to the electronics of an old FireWire-based external HDD...
The two LG-drives were set to Zone 1, and the rest were Zone 2.

[quesadilla5]

Ok, I tried without iTunes. It still locks up and won't eject.

Just now though I was able to eject three discs. I hit eject in Finder first, which doesn't work, but after hitting eject there I do it in makemkv and they ejected.

I wonder if my external hard drives are causing problems. I have two Iomega external drives for time machine backup. I have to turn them off or the system won't reboot. It'll hang at the gray screen at startup without the Apple logo. I can't recall if they were on or off the last time it ejected successfully. But this time they were off. I will test a few more times with them on and see if it makes a difference.