Mojave 10.14.6

After downgrading this back to 10.14.6 it has been solid.  No more booting up to recovery or can't wake up, which I think is related to APFS not being supported in MacPro3,1 and somehow the patch can't handle it.

I need to resist the ever desire and urge to upgrade to the latest patch.

Convert MKV to M4V

It took longer than I'd like.
The MKV is > 2 hours and has a size of 36GB.
The M4V is 4.46GB and it took almost 3.5 hours to convert ...

VLC plays Blu-ray disc

Finally got VLC to play blu-ray disc on my MacPro3,1.  Sure you need MakeMKV in order to make all this work.
My next frontier is to play 4K UHD disc on it.

MacPro3,1 10.14.6

Downloaded JRE 8 something something and now the Blu-ray menu can be played.  I understand my player can even play 4K though I have yet to own any 4K monitor but I'm interested to see a scaled down 4K picture on my monitor.  It's hard to believe Blu-ray is only 1920x1080.

The temptation to upgrade to the latest is always there.  I am still itching to update to 10.15.4 but past experience really left me with a bitter taste.

10.14.6 seems to be very stable for what I do and experience.

macpro3,1 Mojave 10.14.6

I demoted the OS back to 10.14.6 Mojave

For some reason 10.15.4 Catalina just wouldn't stick.

I've spent a few days trying to fix that but no luck.

One good thing came out of this is with the latest vlc 3.0.10 and MakeMV, I can finally made Blu-ray disc playing a reality.  I don't know if I overlooked previously.  Or 3.0.10 is really a new new one, or MakeMV.  It was just a feature in MakeMV to allow itself shared the decoding libraries or something.  Previously, I mean the sticky note on MakeMV forum still has that old information.

So it couldn't be simpler.

macpro3,1 Catalina 10.15.4

I think I somehow destroyed the system.

When you trouble shoot late at night and end up regreting.

I think the SSD is kind of sort of not doing its job but there is no way I can find out what causes the OS couldn't see it.

So against my better judgement I opted to re-install the OS on a separate HDD and in the course of the installation, the HDD got wiped.  And so went my data.  Except there is a copy in my Time Machine, hopefully.

You know there is something wrong just not know what.  In the middle of data migration, the system re-boot itself so in the end, I gave up migration.

I wish I'd stay in MOJAVE.  But I know I'd never learn.

macpro3,1 Catalina 10.15.4

mac went to sleep, wake up screen OK, good sign.  But once entered password, the beach ball keeps spinning.  I guess that's the state of affairs now.
On the other hand my MBP 2012 seems to be just fine with 10.15.4.

At least when I did a reboot I got right back to the login unlike previously when the SSD basically couldn't be read when mounted on drive bay one.

Short sleep doesn't seem to affect the login but a protracted sleep causes the problem.

macpro3,1 macOS10.15.4

The machine has been booting to recovery mode pretty consistently and alarmingly.

So I thought there is something wrong with the file system or something.  But I have a hunch.

So I removed the SSD from the drive bay 1 totally.  And surprise, the mac still boots up what I think it's the recovery mode.  It asks for Language that goes to Utilities.  Apparently the recovery mode is running off entirely from its own, probably from the Time Machine's recovery I imagine but I don't know.

I plugged back the SSD to the optical bay drive via the secret SATA port and power.

Bang, the system goes back to regular login with 10.15.4

So something is wrong with drive bay 1 or how things are connected together I guess.

There are lots of strange thing that I never thought make sense or a difference but it does.

Now the GTX 770 is working the way I expect it to work.  The sleep and wake up seems alright.

At some point I was prepared to make another bootable USB stick to re-install macOS.  The strange thing is I made the stick on my MBP and when I plugged the stick to my MacPro, it doesn't recognize it in recovery....

Too many things I can't explain.

If overnight, the system still boots OK, I will try to reconnect the Blu-ray drive.