MakeMKVCon Not Reading Discs

[DimeonS]

Greetings! I've been a long-time user of MakeMKV and bought the license around 5+ years ago. After losing my entire library in my Plex server due to a power outage + simultaneous RAID card failure, I had to rebuild from scratch. This meant re-ripping my extensive library.

To expedite the process, I've written a rather elaborate program in Python which wraps around MakeMKVCon, MKVMerge and Handbrake to rip and transcode movies (DVD, HD, UHD) and TV episodes before placing the files in the appropriate locations on my Plex server. This has been a work in progress as I find new use cases or discover a bug in my code. However, the codebase has been relatively stable for 6+ months with only minor changes here and there. Ripping has been a breeze: insert a disc, run my script, provide some command line parameters and (depending on the disc) a few minutes later, a title is in my Plex server.

However, I recently updated to MakeMKV 1.16.7 and this is when the problem(s) began. Post upgrade, rather consistently, MakeMKVCon seems unable to open a disc when I run my script. Thinking it might be script related, I ran the same commands against MakeMKVCon in the command prompt and I get the same result: MakeMKVCon fails to find/read a disc. When I open MakeMKV GUI, it finds and reads the disc just fine. I've tried with HD & UHD BluRays and get the same result.

I bought The Matrix Resurrections UHD disc last night at Wal-Mart. Insert the UHD disc and after a bit, Windows Explorer recognizes the disc. I run my script and MakeMKVCon fails to read the disc. I opened MakeMKV GUI and was able to find, read, and rip it just fine.

Is anyone else experiencing this? What's really odd is that it will fail repeatedly; and, without changing code or command line, just work.

Tech specs:

3 x LG (HL-DT-ST) BD-RE WH16NS40 with LibreDrive firmware 1.05, MT1959
-drives have been flashed for over a year and all three work just fine
-ripped hundreds of discs of all formats, occasional hash failure or disc mastering issues
Windows 11 Pro, x64
128GB RAM
AMD Ryzen ThreadRipper 2950x
AMD Radeon 5700xt Anniversary Edition
1 x 2TB Samsung NVMe 980 Pro
1 x 2TB Samsung NVMe 970 Evo
1 x 512GB Samsung NVMe 970 Pro

I've also attached some screen caps of MakeMKV GUI, output from my script, and multiple attempts running MakeMKVCon directly in command prompt.
- disc is inserted in drive "D" (\Device\CdRom0)
- disc UHD
- disc was not ejected at any time while taking the screen caps
- main movie is >140 minutes but I specified a minimum run time of 130 minutes (7800 seconds)
- each time I reduced the minimum run time all the way down to 2 minutes which should have resulted in at least one title.