I have a rather bedeviling query for you.
You see, I have an older Blu-Ray Drive: a HL-DT-ST UH12NS29 that I bought back in the summer of 2013 (like the one below). I do not now, nor have I ever expected it to be capable of reading UHD discs. I have never attempted to flash it with custom firmware.
However...
I'm certain that it used to run Libredrive several years ago in previous versions of MakeMKV (without me having flashed the drive). It was able to read DVDs regardless of region, ripped discs fasted than it does now, and was more successful at reading discs which had been scratched. In fact, I first learned about Libredrive when I saw it come up in the Drive Info window in MakeMKV.
Now I'm not sure when exactly this changed- maybe 2019 or so? But the Drive Information window stopped reporting its LibreDrive capabilities, and instead just reports Libredrive as "Possible, might be supported in future, but not likely soon." I had switched from Windows to Linux about that time, so I chalked it up to a driver issue. But when I reinstalled this drive in a Windows machine, the Libredrive-unsupported message persisted (as you can see below). I tried upgrading the drive's firmware from v1.00 to v1.01 with LG's tool here: https://www.lg.com/us/support/product/l ... 29.AVAA10B, but that didn't change anything.
So I guess my question is- did something change in the last few years to make this drive incompatible with Libredrive? Or am I just completely misremembering things? If it was compatible before, can it be again? I've been hunting through Google for more information about this drive model and Libredrive, but I've only found a couple of old posts from circa 2019 asking about similarly named models, and nothing about the UH12NS29.