OmniDrive firmware lets PC drives rip GameCube, Wii, Xbox discs

OmniDrive pushed a familiar PC part into preservation territory this spring: select Hitachi-LG optical drives based on MediaTek’s MT1959 platform can now be flashed to read and dump game discs that usually send collectors hunting for rarer hardware.

The firmware landed on February 18 and quickly moved from curiosity to recommended tool in the Redump ecosystem. Redump says OmniDrive replaces the older JB8 3.10 Rib firmware it had recommended since 2022, and it now supports Redumper build 702 and later as well as Media Preservation Frontend 3.7.0 and later. In practical terms, that makes the same kind of desktop and slimline drives many people already use for PC media work far more useful for archive-grade disc dumping.

RibShark’s GitHub README says OmniDrive adds lead-in and lead-out reading for CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays, raw sector reading, and a custom READ DISC RAW command. The current game-disc list includes original Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series, GameCube, and Wii, while the README also notes broader support for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, and Wii U media, with an important limit: those discs remain encrypted and the disc key is not retrievable. Dreamcast GD-ROM and GD-R support is partial, with only the low-density area readable.

The project’s early release history was fast. Version 1.0.0, 1.0.1, and 1.0.2 all arrived in February, with the first build bringing Xbox, GameCube, and Wii support, then later updates fixing CD read speed and slow DVD and Blu-ray reads through READ DISC RAW. In the Dolphin Emulator Forum, RibShark said GameCube and Wii dumping was already running at full speed, up to 8x on slim drives and 16x on desktop drives, and said the source code was public even though firmware downloads were withheld over copyright concerns.

Compatibility still matters, and OmniDrive is not a casual flash for any drive on the shelf. Redump says the drive must report MT1959 in MakeMKV, not MT1939, and that incompatible chipset revision will not work. The project currently has two released firmware variants, for the ASUS BW-16D1HT 3.02 and the LG BU40N 1.00, while RibShark also named other potentially compatible models including the ASUS BC-12D2HT, BU50N, BP50NB10, and multiple LG drives such as WH16NS40 and BH16NS58. RetroRGB also noted a real-world test on an ASUS BW-16D1HT that successfully dumped a PS2 game and still handled UHD Blu-ray ripping afterward.

That is the appeal of OmniDrive in one line: a cheap, ordinary PC optical drive can now do preservation work that once depended on specialized, hard-to-find setups.