http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/ Engadget Comments for Ask Engadget HD: Best Blu-ray optical drive for my PC? http://www.engadget.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.engadget.com en-us Copyright 2012 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 12:18PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/
$3/disc - http://www.mwave.com/mwave/Skusearch.hmx?scriteria=AA72514

(I don't know how well these work)]]>Jan 14th 2009 12:42PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/
I also have a standalone LG Blu-ray player. The video quality on my HTPC (with a ATI 4750 HD) is so much better than the stand-alone Blu-ray player its incomparable! It's really quite a big difference. The ATI video card took a minumum of tweaking to color settings to get it vastly superior to the standalone player. I highly recommend it. I've used PowerDVD 8 and ArcSoft TotalMedia, they both work flawlessly. I like ArcSoft better because it can also do HD-DVD (PowerDVD 8 only Blu), and it is integrated right into Vista Media Center! It also does the latest audio formats like TrueHD over analog. I like analog better, it seems to give much better sound than digital especially in music.]]>Jan 15th 2009 2:09AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/
]]>Jan 14th 2009 12:25PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 12:31PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 12:34PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/
I don't accept the software is crap at all unless we're talking about Mac OS X.]]>Jan 14th 2009 12:42PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/
I bought an LG drive at Best Buy on black Friday, and it has been working well so far. But, that's only been a couple months, so I can't speak too soon.]]>Jan 14th 2009 12:32PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 12:56PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 1:07PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/xbmc is a great media center, but it does not do hardware accelerated video on any platform (yet). So it is only good for 1080 playback if you have a really beefy CPU ( > 3ghz dual core intel or maybe now the phenom 2 overclocked). For 720P you can get away with any mid range CPU. xbmc uses ffmpeg for its decoding and it is all software based at the moment. Oddly, the best shot at hardware accelerated video in xbmc right now is on Linux with Nvidia graphics, which is under development.]]>Jan 14th 2009 8:58PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 1:17PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 2:31PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 16th 2009 11:44AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 1:25PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 1:31PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 1:42PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 1:41PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 2:26PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/
I would have duct taped it to the underside, but I want to keep the unit level.

No need for burner for me, I am moving data to a hard drive, not creating more physical media.]]>Jan 14th 2009 2:31PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 2:39PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 8:36PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 6:44PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 7:22PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 15th 2009 4:45AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 7:59PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 14th 2009 7:55PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 15th 2009 5:06AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 15th 2009 12:47PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/Jan 15th 2009 1:20PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/14/ask-engadget-hd-which-blu-ray-optical-drive-for-my-pc/
Still too expensive really. And that's for the single layer. The DL 50GB disks are still in the stratosphere around $24.

I'm not sure what I need these for anyway. Sending photos? CDR is fine. Sending DivX movies? DVD-R is fine. Unless you're burning your own HD movies for distribution to relatives, and you just might want to use DVD-Rs for that too, I'm not clear why we need these burners that bad right now.

As others have said, buy a cheap external USB drive for backup.]]>Jan 16th 2009 11:58AM