Hello,

Well I finally got my BLU-RAY ROM LITE-ON|DH-4O1S-11 from Newegg this morning.

It works!!! It really really works!

It is a sata model. I had bought a pci sata card for extra interface ports - My boot harddrive took up one sata port and the 500gb harddrive I added took up the other port. WIth this I was able to use a power converter cable to add on jthe power connection for the bluray drive (the only aviailable power sata cables were already taken fot he previously mentioned harddrives). It was very quick to install with only the power cable and the sata cable needed for installation.

It actually does come with powerdvd 7 with the bluray edition for playback purposes. However I had already purchased powerdvd ultra for use with my xbox 360 hddvd addon drive.

Once my computer started I was able to pop in the XMen 3 bluray disc I bought yesterday. It started up right away. However there was a stutter and partial freeze on one scene on my initial test. However I used taks manager to force close powerdvd. Once it was completely stopped I restarted powerdvd. The disc played perfectly the second try.

It actually seems to be a bit smoother than my hddvd drive. I believe my earlier observation that my addon drive is a usb drive rather than internal may be the reason for the recurring stutters I have (minor as I mentioned in previous threads - similar to dvd layer changes). This time with an internal drive rather than external the playback seems nearly perfect. I do have some hesitations but barely noticeable. THe action scenes where xavier is killed and much of the alcatraz ending action sequences played back with absolutely no problems.

THe audio sounds great. It is uncompressed audio and read as dts on my non high def digital sony amp.

I am really looking forward now to going to blockbuster for renting high def movies. THat was the bummer with only having an hddvd drive - netflix was my only option. Now if its on BLuray I can rent it at blockbuster.

Thanks to everyone for helping out in the "cheap bluray pc player" thread in the latest news section. I gained a lot of insight into what was needed for high def playback. With upgrading to 2gbs ram and adding the sata pci card I believe I made the proper additions. I may still look into upgrading to a dual core amd. However my amd 64 3800+ 2.4ghz pc running vista premium seems to be quite adequate for bluray and hddvd playback.