Crossflashing Legal or Illegal?

[DVD Maniac]

OK so to be clear I am not addressing the legalities / moral issues surrounding media backups or whatever. That's been done to death and i'm not touching it with anyone's bargepole. Simple question is : You purchase a UHD Read Friendly Drive which is locked out by the shipped firmware. You cross-flash allowing you to LEGITMATELY PLAY your own LEGALLY purchased media on your PC rather than a stand alone player with the argument you have the right to play something you own modified by you to play on a device the manufacturer in their bizarre wisdom has decided to cripple deliberately with its own firmware. Analogy - you buy a car with a maximum speed of 180mph which is limited to 150mph and you buy a new engine management chip because you want to LEGALLY drive round the Nürburgring like a complete nutter.

I'll put on my suit of armour and wait for the bombardment

[SamuriHL]

You'll likely void the warranty, just like your car analogy. That's about it.

[DVD Maniac]

Yes that's exactly the conclusion I reached. As to whether an actual RMA return would ever spot this is debateable. HDD returns always seem far more stringent and I have had several battles with the likes of WD and Seagate etc .

Please if anyone has run into any issues with returns of self flashed ASUS, LG, whatever let me know. I'm not talking bricked which is obviously something different, just failed laser / transport.

[SamuriHL]

I'm of the opinion if you brick a drive doing stupid stuff to it, sucks to be you and the warranty doesn't really cover that case. But if in the course of normal wear and tear the thing up and dies, the warranty should apply. With that caveat out of the way, if you can still see the drive, you can likely still flash it back to original firmware for RMA if you're paranoid. And if you can't see the drive because it's so dead that it's not even showing up at all, then they likelihood that they're going to take the time to try to resurrect it to see what you flashed to it is very small.

[DVD Maniac]

This is where it gets in grey area once again about intent of use. Not going there again I agree pure hardware failures should be covered. It all begs the question : Why remove functionality that your own product supports deliberately? Pressure from Film Industry and their associated cronies or Profit driven to sell stupidly over priced native drives or a combination of both I suspect. Well at least some consumers like us are not playing their game.

[VarHD]

Why remove functionality that your own product supports deliberately? Pressure from Film Industry and their associated cronies (...)

It could be much simpler - it just doesn't work reliably and they don't want to sell you something that doesn't work. I mean if you saw an ad on the box saying "reads 3-layered BD movie discs" and then sometimes it doesn't or it doesn't read some of them, you would say "why advertise a feature if it's not reliable".

Based on my experience, I had a case where one specific disc just won't work at all - the drive won't read it, and several other cases where it won't read it every time, maybe only 3 out of 5 times. If I were the drive manufacturer, I'd disable this too to avoid backlash from customers who only bought the drive for this purpose. I'd even say that we're now in a win-win situation - the manufacturer wins because he doesn't guarantee this functionality and we win because with a few seconds of work (flashing the drive via the manufacturer's official software) we get a drive that will do the job in 99% of the cases

[DVD Maniac]

You make some good points here. I too have experienced some random performance with cross flashed drives but this is usually fixed with a reboot and fairy liquid treatment on the disk This might be manufacturer linked. What do you have ASUS LG etc? Never had a problem with ASUS but LG can be less reliable in my experience. I am sceptical about whether the well known ASUS rebrands are "Identical" as regular tests produce different results on the same test of factory sourced originals.

[VarHD]

If you want my whole story, check out this thread: https://www.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=19726

Short version, I now own 3 copies of "The Hunger Games: Catching Fire", the only one I could rip was the one slightly lower quality release that's on a 2-layered disc. The other two releases that come on a 3-layer disc can't be read. I'm 100% certain the discs are clean and I tested them in two drives - an LG and ASUS, with different firmwares, reboots, also cross-flashing.

From what I read here, it's apparently a known issue with some triple-layer discs. They come with ridiculous data density and those drives simply struggle reading them, there's also a higher chance for errors already at the disc manufacturing stage. You might not notice this with a "normal" 4K Blu-ray drive you connect to a TV because if those drive can't read a few bytes, they might skip them and you may not even notice some glitch in the sound or picture, but when we're ripping this stuff, the drive must read everything precisely.

Never had a problem with ASUS but LG can be less reliable in my experience.

I ripped almost my entire library with the ASUS, I only bought the LG to test it if would read the bad "Hunger Games" discs. It didn't. Because I only have room for one drive at a time, I continued the ripping with the LG drive. It died within less than 2 months. ASUS is still alive. To really know which one is better, we'd need data from tens of thousands of users at least, then we could see a pattern. So far it's just - I had better luck with one drive, you had with the other

Anyway, point is - I'm sure the manufacturers have this data, tested their drives with lots of discs, looked at the results and thought "nope, we can't ship it with this feature, we'll get all of them back for service".

[DVD Maniac]

Interesting debate. Here in UK LG drives are 20% higher than ASUS suggesting higher quality Laser or Transport. But I have a 2016 manufactured ASUS 16x which is going like a trouper. Maybe we should start up a thread with failure rates to eliminate random issues and brand assumptions? I will setup if I get enough positive views.

[Billycar11]

LG makes the Asus drive so it can't be higher quality they are the same just different firmware

[DVD Maniac]

Yes was aware. So the price differential is just down to branding. Typical

[DVD Maniac]

I ripped almost my entire library with the ASUS, I only bought the LG to test it if would read the bad "Hunger Games" discs. It didn't. Because I only have room for one drive at a time, I continued the ripping with the LG drive. It died within less than 2 months. ASUS is still alive. To really know which one is better, we'd need data from tens of thousands of users at least, then we could see a pattern. So far it's just - I had better luck with one drive, you had with the other

I personally have yet to find a disk the ASUS 12x and 16x Internals. can't read when properly flashed. I too own a Hunger Games title and no issues with the 16x. LG is definitely more random in results so I am still left wondering about the rebadge of LG. There must be something different surely given one completely clean original works on one and not the other?????