Hardware Underground: A Conversation with Billy Carlson

Billy Carlson runs a small operation flashing optical drives so they can rip 4K UHD Blu-rays - work that lives almost entirely on the MakeMKV forums and depends on a shrinking supply of hardware that LG, Pioneer, and ASUS no longer make. He's based in the US; his closest collaborators are scattered across the globe. We spoke over email across May 2026.

Hi Billy, as a user of your flashed drives and someone who counts on MakeMKV professionally, it's a real treat to get to talk with you about the work you do helping people with disc ripping. To start things off: how did you get into flashing drives?

I had just gotten the Jurassic Park collection in 4K. I had a 4K player and TV, but my surround sound AVR didn't support the latest HDCP, so it wouldn't let me play it even though it could handle 4K 24Hz and HDR. I did some research and found people were flashing PC drives to copy them, but the guide left a lot to be guessed at. I tried it, figured out the missing stuff, and made a new how-to video that had all the steps, so there were no questions about how to do it. I've kept the guide updated since with better methods as they come out - like when I made the DE firmware after LG disabled DOS flash in their new firmware.

Were you always into computers?

I was. My first job was working IT at a school at age 16. I never really did hacking stuff, but I had a slight bit of know-how for it. I was always rooting my phone and flashing ROMs - I still have my current phone rooted, a Sony Xperia 1 IV. Google makes that a pain. Every few weeks you need a new key box to keep "secure" apps like Wallet working so you can do tap-and-pay and that kind of thing.

For someone who's never opened a PC, what does "flashing a drive" actually mean, and why is it specifically needed for 4K UHD discs?

Flashing a drive is changing the firmware - basically the drive's operating system - to one with an exploit in it that can disable bus encryption over the SATA bus. Disabling bus encryption is needed specifically for 4K because we don't have access to the AACS keys for 2.0+ to decrypt UHD discs, so instead we use volume keys and remove the bus encryption.

How long was it before you went from doing this for yourself to doing it for others?

Only a few weeks. From the day after I did mine, I was already helping people with flashing. A lot of folks didn't have the hardware required - in the old days you needed a PC with SATA IDE mode - so it made sense to start a send-in service. Eventually that evolved into people buying the drive direct from me, because some were sending in the wrong drives and wasting both my time and theirs.

What was the send-in era like?

Pretty chaotic. I did same-day service when possible, but it got tedious when wrong drives kept showing up due to errors on the store end. One time, a guy ordered an ASUS BW16 Blu-ray drive from Micro Center and had it shipped directly to my house to save on shipping. What I got was an ASUS DVD drive. The closest Micro Center to me is 40 minutes away with no traffic, and it's near Philly, so there's always traffic. But to save him money, I drove there and back to exchange it. That was quite the story to explain - that they sent the wrong drive and I wasn't trying to pull one over on them. The only thing that saved it was that the serial number matched the DVD drive. Good thing they noted them on the order receipt. And that's on top of, why do I have another guy's drive from another state, exchanging it for him? I didn't think about it at the time, but I definitely lost money providing that service. Flashing and testing was $25.

How did people find you back then?

The same way as now - MakeMKV or Reddit. I had a YouTube video too.

The guide you maintain on the MakeMKV forums credits a long list of contributors. How did that group come together?

Marty was there from day one. He was doing basically the same thing as me, but in Australia. The others kind of gave some tips on hardware and tricks to make it a bit easier, so I added their names. The biggest contributors are Marty and Mike, the MakeMKV dev. He gave us some secret info about LG firmware that let us make the DE firmware to get around LG disabling DOS flash.

What's your actual relationship with Mike and Marty like? Have you ever met?

None of us have met - we're all in different countries. I'm in the US, Marty's in Australia, and Mike, well, we don't know, but maybe Russia if you go by where MakeMKV is hosted. Mike is very privacy-focused. I've only ever done encrypted emails with him, but I get it when you're the enemy of Hollywood. With Marty it's mostly emails, maybe a call here and there. Most of our talking is in public, figuring stuff out together.

You also reopened r/makemkv at some point. How did that come about?

The MakeMKV forum is extremely slow right now because of AI scraper bots. That's actually why I reopened r/makemkv during the Reddit strikes a few years ago. The owner had made it private and left Reddit forever - not Mike, by the way. I wasn't a big Redditor, but I saw the need for some redundancy. I had to get enough positive upvotes to qualify for requesting ownership of a closed subreddit, so I spent a few months going to all the PC tech support subreddits and just helping people to get upvotes. Eventually I got it done.

Who are your customers? Has the profile shifted over time?

I think most of my customers are AV enthusiasts and a bit of activists wanting to fully own their media. It's stayed that way the whole time. In the beginning there was a lot of "I'm just trying to watch my movie," but in the later years - 2022 and on - it's not really an issue I see as much.

Do you still have that original Jurassic Park 4K rip? And what does your own home setup look like - software, hardware, how you watch movies?

Yeah, I still have the original Jurassic Park rip and the box set. I use JRiver on PC with full rips, and I have a Ugoos I'm playing with too.

Where do you source drives now that LG and Pioneer have officially exited the optical drive market?

I don't really source them from anywhere now. I have a few I'm working on getting supported by Mike, the MakeMKV dev. Once they're supported, I'll sell them. I've moved to mostly remote flashing now.

What's the secondary market look like?

It's crazy. A drive I was selling a few months ago for $200 flashed, tested, and shipped now goes for $1,000+ with no work done to it.

The amount of fakes on the used market is really discouraging too. It screws over so many people. They think they're getting a deal because it's $100 less than the real drives, then they get a drive from 2014 that's been recased and restickered to look new with a 2025 build date. Those drives are worth $25 and they sometimes go for $300+. The fake recase factories in China are making a killing and ruining the whole market.

When you first realized people were getting scammed with recased drives, how did that hit you?

At first it didn't happen much, and it was people buying them for like $25 shipped from China to their door - kind of a what did you expect for that price situation. But now they're charging way more, just a bit below what real drives go for. It does feel a bit personal, especially the Pioneers, since they stole the flashing tool for that. There was no public Pioneer flasher until May 11th, from DVDFab, and they probably stole from that flasher too. But it's all over now.

Did you foresee all of the manufacturers disappearing?

I did not think all of them would leave within a year of each other. I have a suspicion they were forced to by not being able to renew their PC Blu-ray drive manufacturing license. I anticipated a slow loss of interest over many years, not a sudden stop like this.

What makes you think licensing is what happened? Have you read anything specific?

Just the pattern - both manufacturers pulled out so close to each other, and the new one also stopped almost right away after promising to restart. No solid proof.

You bought the last 1,655 Pioneer XD08 drives in the USA. How did you decide to make that buy?

I was looking at them for months when they were up over 2,500 in stock. Pioneer hadn't made the official announcement they'd stopped until May 2025, but I'd kind of known since November 2024. I bought one first and was testing how to crossflash it to do UHD. I figured out a way, reported it to the MakeMKV dev to add support, and didn't hear back for months. I took the gamble and figured I could do it a bit different if he didn't add support for the new flashing method. They sat in my garage for around six months. Then the MakeMKV dev said he could support it and added it shortly after. I was never in doubt I could get them to work, but without Mike, my way of adding support would have been a lot less ideal for end users.

What kept you from hoarding them and just selling them for a huge profit?

I looked at it as - I'm making the last drives as good as they can be.

At what point did this stop being a hobby?

In 2022 was when I considered it a real business and not just a side hobby that made money.

At peak, you were doing 800 drives a month. What did 100 boxes of drives every few days actually look like?

In a mid-size sedan, it's a full trunk and from the floor and seats to the roof in the back, with some on my wife's lap in the passenger seat. If I took my dad's truck, it would fill the 5.5-foot bed with 75 boxes stacked three high, and the other 25 went in the cab. Much easier in the truck, but I usually did it in the car. The post office absolutely hated me showing up with 100+ drives every few days. I actually got kicked out of two post offices - they told me to go to the distribution center. Luckily, the third post office in my area dealt with me.

Did you ever feel overwhelmed?

It was overwhelming in the beginning - 2018 with the send-in service - and at the end in 2025. But it was smooth from 2020 through late 2024. Then orders really ramped up, plus Pioneer was going out of production.

Your wife was riding shotgun with drives on her lap. What did she think of all this at the start?

She was indifferent at first, but started to help in the last two years once tons of orders came in. Now she's happy with the business I built.

You eventually moved your business to selling Pioneer drives exclusively, and some people in the community accused you of being a Pioneer shill - even though, as you've said, you moved to Pioneer because the failure rate on LG and ASUS drives was so high. How did you handle those accusations at the time?

I got why. It didn't really bother me. I have the numbers. Only me and two other people have seen this many modern optical drives, and we all pretty much agree - the other two being Marty and asmcom.

Before switching to Pioneer, you were seeing roughly a 25% failure rate on the LG and ASUS drives you ordered for customers - essentially eating the cost of one in four, plus the time to test them and swap them out. How did that math not bankrupt you?

I was exchanging them. I couldn't afford to lose that much - I was making very little from this. I'd put them back to stock firmware. Not that the stores check, but just in case. Late 2019 was when I stopped with the 5.25" LG and ASUS drives, after I got four bad ASUSes in a row. It makes you question all your other equipment - cables, PC, RAM, everything.

That actually happened to me once. A Pioneer threw hash errors at me, and I was confused because I'd never seen that. Turned out the drive was fine - one of my sticks of RAM had failed. I figured it out with Prime95 and Memtest. A few months later, a guy emailed me about the same thing. I told him Pioneers don't get hash errors, you have bad RAM or a bad HDD. He ended up having bad RAM too. Pioneers are so reliable they can be used to test RAM with MakeMKV.

You've mentioned wanting to make a documentary about the history of all this - and specifically about how 4K on PC was, in your words, "sabotaged" multiple times. What's the story you feel hasn't been told?

4K on PC through official playback could never get lossless sound and HDR. Intel's chips at the time - 7th through 10th gen - didn't natively support HDMI 2.0, so you had a choice: lose HDR and have lossless sound, or get a more expensive motherboard with a DisplayPort-to-HDMI converter built in to get HDMI 2.0 - but in those converters, bitstreaming wasn't supported.

I'm not saying this is Intel's fault. It's the people who chose them and restricted use to them only. At the time, Nvidia and AMD GPUs had HDMI 2.0, but whoever was making decisions about UHD Blu-ray on PC didn't think about how to get full quality out of playback.

What I want people to understand is that there was unnecessary restriction and complication that led to "less demand for Blu-ray drives on PC." If normal people could have just watched their movies on PC, the PC drive market would have been much bigger and we wouldn't be here.

So basically enshittification?

Pretty much. I think it's both the world we live in now, but once people realize how locked down things are and it messes with normal people, there's pushback and companies back off. A few examples - Xbox One saying they required always-online even for disc games. People pushed back and they backed down.

Players are still being produced in mass - that's confusing alongside the drive market collapsing. Any insight into the player vs. drive market?

Yeah, players are still being produced in mass. Some have pulled out, but I don't think there's a worry there yet. They're licensed differently, as I alluded to. Players seem to be able to renew the license to manufacture for now. Recently I/O Data said they were resuming production, then something happened and now sales are suspended.

Do you think physical media is dying, surviving as a niche, or making a vinyl-style comeback?

4K, according to my numbers, was hitting its peak drive sales right as they discontinued the drives. At peak, right before I ran out, I was selling 800+ drives a month. I think 4K physical media will survive its niche until it's replaced with something better.

Do you agree with the activist customers who want to fully own their media, or are you okay with subscription services yourself? Are there films or shows you've ripped specifically because you were worried they'd disappear?

I agree with them. I feel the same way, but I don't take it so extreme that I won't use streaming services. I generally don't like pirating, but I know sometimes it's the only way for out-of-print stuff. I think it's fine in the context that you own it, or it's now impossible to buy new and is being scalped at a high price.

Do you think the hobby is going to shrink now that so many fake drives are out there?

I do think it will shrink. I'll help people avoid the fakes the best I can, but most who fall for them only seek out the info after it's too late.

You haven't mentioned any of this being hard on you, but 800 drives a month plus a guide plus a community plus dealing with fakes plus fighting with post offices sounds exhausting. Has there ever been a point where you wanted to walk away?

I never thought about completely walking away, but I did stop some stuff that made it extra tedious. I stopped selling LG and ASUS 5.25" drives in 2019 because of the QC. The slims were better for reliability. Then in 2022 I moved to Pioneers exclusively because they really were that much better. I would never have been able to scale to 800 a month with LG and ASUS, since 25% of them failed my testing and I had to exchange them - and that doesn't even count after they get to the customer. The Pioneer fail rate is less than 1% total, even after getting to the customer. A lot of people thought I was a shill for Pioneer because only I could flash them, but that wasn't why. It was for the reliability and a lot less trouble with customers.

It sounds like you genuinely enjoy helping people find solutions. Is that the same in real life?

Yeah. Same for neighbors - they have me fix PCs every now and then. In the IT job, I was the one offering some sympathy. The boss didn't want us to do data recovery if it was an OS issue where we needed to reinstall, but I'd pull their docs and PowerPoints with a live USB if they wanted me to. I got in trouble for it once or twice, but whatever.

Do you ever get requests to teach or mentor?

People ask all the time, but they're usually just looking for my tools - the ones I made for myself to auto-flash drives. The stuff isn't that useful really, just a bit of basic reverse engineering and scripting.

Do you think hacking hardware will become easier with all the AI stuff coming online?

For now I don't think AI is useful at all for actual firmware stuff. There's no public documentation in the models, I'd assume. I tried it a bit and it was completely useless - so much was wrong, and it led you in circles doing nothing. But maybe one day. 3D printing will be useful for lots of stuff like repairs, and the on-demand circuit board stuff is good too.

In ten years, do you think someone will still be doing what you do?

I'm sure some of this will still be going on, but at the very least something similar will be happening with the replacement for 4K UHD discs, if one is out. I don't think optical drive flashing will be very relevant in 10 years unless new stuff comes out. I see myself still in IT, probably just a regular data center job.

If something happened tomorrow and you couldn't do this anymore, is there someone who could pick it up?

If everyone in it now left, we'd be in trouble. But there are quite a few of us for now, so support and knowledge isn't ending anytime soon.

Photos provided by Billy: his testing station and his car full of drives en route to the post office.