I’m one of those cro magnons that still (mostly) watch movies from physical discs. But on Linux! So I have to rip everything with makemkv first… which sounds like a big chore, but isn’t — I’ve got a very efficient setup with several bluray players that can rip in parallel. It’s just kinda part of my routine while watching other things to swap discs and enter some commands now and then. I’ve been doing this for decades…
But!
Last year the USB bus started panic()king when inserting new discs from Criterion!
Now, of course, DVDs and blurays have “copy protection” and stuff apparently designed to make it impossible for people like me to watch the movies I’ve paid for, but it’s a solved problem, and I didn’t think the people who made discs these days bothered to innovate further. I mean, what’s the point? Why develop new “copy protection” schemes at this point, when the market is so small?
But apparently the people Criterion use for mastering their discs have innovated — inserting one of their discs into the drives above there freezes the USB bus and requires me to reboot the machine.
Not fun!
As a workaround, using this slim-line bluray drive was fine — but it’s much slower than the drives I was using (BD-RE ASUS BW-16D1HT, they’re called), and besides, it was annoying to have to remember to not insert any Criterion discs into the Asus drives.
So: Debugging time. But was the problem the drives or the USB adapters?
The Asus drives are SATA drives, and I was using these USB adapters from ST Labs to connect to the computer. (And the adapter has to be powered, because these drives are really internal drives, and use a lot of power.) It’s possible that the Criterion discs were confusing the drives so much that they emitted USB responses that crashed the bus, but I thought it was vaguely more likely that the problem was with the adapters? Possibly?
So I bought new adapters from StarTech, and… They didn’t work at all, because they only support actual hard disks and not optical (“ATAPI”, I guess?) devices: They didn’t find the devices at all.
So I ordered Inateck USB 3.0 zu SATA Konverter Adapter für 2.5 / 3.5 Zoll Laufwerke HDD SSD mit 12V 2A Netzteil from Germany, because they claimed it supports everything.
And…
Works perfectly!
And I can now rip Criterion disks with the Asus drives again.
So there you go — if you’re one of the other final three remaining people on Earth that 1) buys optical discs 2) from Criterion and want to 3) watch them on 4) Linux using 5) Asus drives, you now know where to buy 6) USB 3 adapters.
*phew*