Techpulse 120 external USB-C UHD BluRay Burner
I bought this BluRay-Burner mainly to rip my DVDs and BluRays for use with Kodi/OSMC. As some of my media was bought in the USA, the region restrictions were in my way and I looked for a way to overcome them. My tool of choice for ripping is MakeMKV and in their forum I learned first about LibreDrive: a firmware in the RAM of the drive which can directly access media in the drive without the above mentioned restrictions. But how can you enable this on your drive? You have to downgrade your firmware (which is usually disabled by the manufacturer) to allow loading and executing firmware in the RAM of the drive. Especially using MacOS this can be challenging as the tools necessary often only exist for Microsoft Windows.
So here I want to describe how to flash the necessary firmware on a MacBookPro for the above drive:
(obviously the usual caveat: it worked for me, I can not guarantee it will work for you. I do not provide the software and firmware and therefore can not ensure their quality or legal status)
First I downloaded HirensBootCD to boot my MBP from a USB thumb drive into Windows. This is based on WindowsPE, an official version of Microsoft Windows that is licensed without payment for this kind of use. You should use UNetbootin to create a bootable USB thumb drive from this image. I am not sure if you can remove the thumb drive if successfully booted, so I used an additional one for the software and firmware-images for the drive (if you have only 1 USB port, you could use a HUB).
On the second USB thumb drive I put a copy of the unpacked archive from this forum post, which contains the Windows-Software to flash the drive and several firmware images:
To boot from the USB thumb drive you have to keep the “option” key pressed while booting to select it as boot media (option or alt is the key second left from the space bar, in case you are unsure).
When Windows has successfully booted I copied the archive from the second stick to the “desktop” before removing the stick with the archive to free a USB port for the optical drive.
I unpacked the archive and started the exe-file (careful: please ignore all files starting with a dot in the name, these are created by MacOS and are without meaning for Windows) and chose “DE_LG BU40N_1.00.bin” to flash my BluRay drive.
After successfully flashing, I rebooted to MacOS (just don’t press a key during the next reboot) and started MakeMKV. There I could see the following:
As you can see, I got LibreDrive Information – Status: Enabled
This was what this is all about and after that, I was able to rip US-DVD and BluRay media. If you insert media you should get something like the following:
For this post I just tried to rip an UHD BluRay for the first time and if the key to the disc is known, this works like with any other BluRay (see the UHD FAQ)
btw. the free beta-key for MakeMKV can always be found here (or see next post)
Many thanks to Sebastian from Techpulse 120 for terrific support via email. I am very happy with the drive and recommend it to others who are looking for a USB (UHD) BluRay Burner (I just used it to read/rip so far)