Bluray Ripping speeds

[Merchy]

Hey folks, fairly new to ripping my DVDs and Blurays and have been using MakeMKV. I'm having weirdly slow speeds and I've read a ton of both the MakeMKV forums and random Google threads but haven't found my exact situation. I apologize in advance if this has been discussed or answered already.

I've had great success so far with both DVDs and Blu-rays - only one hiccup with Interstellar, but I think the disc itself was flawed. Here's my issue - up until now, I was perfectly content that both DVDs and Blu-rays took hours to rip. I just assumed that it was a labor intensive, slow process. Then I started reading about people ripping a BR in thirty minutes. So i started paying more attention to things and finally realized that all of my rip reads were going at 0.1x or 0.2x instead of 6x, 8x, 10x or more. I read up on riplocked drives and could only dream of ripping at 2x.

I'm running Windows 7 x64 on an i7, 6GB DDR3 RAM, 250GB SSD and storing on an external HDD. I started with an LG UH12NS30 and thought maybe it was a bad drive. I now have a Pioneer BDR-209D (with newest 1.31 firmware) and have the exact same speed issue. I've switched SATA ports and SATA cables, DMA is enabled. I've disabled AV and any non-essential software, run hardware tests on my HDDs without any effect. The processor and RAM usage both stay low during rips.

Every once in a blue moon the read speed "spikes" up to about 4x for 10 seconds or so and then falls back to 0.1x or 0.2x (even 0.0x) for the next 30-45 minutes. The rips are ultimately successful, they just take forever. What else can I look at to increase the read speed? What could be causing such a low read speed when I have a more than capable machine to be burning on? I'm baffled but hoping that someone can point me in the right direction. Thanks in advance for any suggestions, comments or tips.

[slee02]

I was having problems on some discs....some were dirty and I cleaned them with (non-abrasive) dish soap and water (just the bottom side) and some ripped usually around 20-30 mins. while some failed to rip at all..even though they would play fine...I took back my new dvd collection of clint eastwood and got a replacement, then all discs ripped fine...just those 2 from the last didn't...I don't know how good makemkv is for reporting read errors (sectors)??? I'm still trying to figure out some of the settings (read my other posts)....

[Kerry56]

storing on an external HDD

If you are ripping straight to this external disk, try ripping one to your SSD instead. Yes, I know, it will take a lot of your room, but as an experiment, try this once, then move it to the external drive or delete this copy.

[Merchy]

@slee02 - This is every single disc, some older ones I've had and new ones I recently bought. I've never had any of them burn over 0.2x other than a 15-20 second spike up to around 4x an then back down to 0.2x or 0.1x.

@kerry56 - I tried that already. I burned a bunch to the SSD and then copied them over manually to the external drive. No difference.

That's what makes me think there has to be some weird bottleneck that reduces the read speed not the write speed. I'm certainly no expert, just trying to be logical about it.

Thanks for the replies. Any more comments would be greatly appreciated.

[slee02]

I would not use an SSD because they are limited to so many writes, thats why you shouldn't have your pagefile or temp files on an SSD....I would re-install windows 7 from scratch to see if that resolves the issue. I know it's a lot of work... You can use your taskmanager to see what processes are running and what processing is taking place while this is going on (%). Right-click on taskbar and choose start task manager...then processes tab... since you replaced your br drive with a good one, that couldn't be the br drive....almost software related.... it should only take 20-35 mins or less to rip a bluray (about 40-50gb)...

[johns0]

Somethings wrong in your system,only takes me about 15-30 minutes at the most to rip a blu-ray disc,try updating your chipset drivers.

[redwudz]

My BD rips take about 20 minutes or so. I have a Pioneer 203, 208 and a 209D. The 209 is much faster than the other two.
Any of my HDDs are faster than my BDRs. That has never been a bottleneck.

I would also suspect a motherboard driver problem.

[fritzi93]

I agree, update your chipset drivers.

[Merchy]

It's an older MB and I have the newest chipset drivers (from 2011) but I will go ahead and uninstall/reinstall them just to be sure. Thanks for the suggestion.

[redwudz]

If those were PATA optical drives, then that was a common problem where the drive was subject to multiple read errors and
would go into PIO mode and be very slow. But I haven't heard of SATA optical drives with that problem.

But, just for reference, here's the common fix for PATA drives:

To check DMA/PIO mode within Windows:

Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager>IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.

From there, right click on one of the channels and choose 'Properties>Advanced Settings'. All drives should be DMA mode. The 'Current Transfer Mode' for Hard drives is usually DMA 4-6 and DVD burners DMA 2-4, DVD ROMs usually DMA 2. If you see any in PIO mode, that can slow things down.

Changing them back may be easy or complicated. First see if you can change them in that window. If not, I usually uninstall the channel the drive is on and let the OS reinstall it. This will usually take a reboot. This will not damage any files on the computer.

But deleting/uninstalling the drivers and reinstalling them after a reboot would probably be what I would try.

[fritzi93]

Dunno if this has any bearing, but:

I had trouble with my mobo and GPT partition hard drives, which would disappear. I'd re-install the SATA drivers to get them back, but they'd eventually disappear again. Tried newest drivers, older drivers, even did a mobo firmware flash.

So I gave up and put in a PCIe SATA card for the GPT drives, which fixed the problem.

My point being, the problem may be your mobo and SATA drivers. If all else fails, get a SATA card.

Good luck.

[Merchy]

Just a follow up to close out this thread. I ended up formatting and re-installing Windows on this computer and, lo and behold, I can now rip Blu-rays at 5x to 6x instead of 0.1x! I don't know what to do with all the spare time I have now that it takes 15 minutes instead of 4-5 hours per rip.

Just in case this helps anyone else or further explains the root cause of this, this computer originally was installed on an IDE drive. I cloned the drive onto a replacement SSD drive and everything "seemed" to function normally. Things ran dramatically faster than before (other than the ripping). I had a few minor issues with MS Office but assumed it was just Office being Office.

The one major difference I noticed after re-installing is that under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in Device Manager, I now only have Channel 0 and Channel 1. Before I nuked it, I had channels 0-6 and channels 0 and 1 had two entries. So it would appear that it didn't delete the old controller info, it just merged the old and new together into a mess.

TL;DR - 1. Everything works perfectly after nuke/re-install of Windows. 2. Don't clone IDE to SATA - install from scratch.

Thanks again to everyone for your input.