External BluRay Writer for Laptop

[Anonymous1]

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[hech54]

The first question you need to ask yourself is....Why do you want to put DVDs on to a Blu Ray disc. DVDs are MUCH cheaper, much easier to find blanks with proven quality(Verbatim, Taiyo Yuden) and NOT to make you sound dumb or anything....you know that the quality will NOT improve putting DVD to Blu Ray....right?

And in my opinion....a external Blu Ray burner with a Laptop?
I would not even consider that.....sorry.

[Anonymous1]

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[hech54]

I already answered...Blu Ray burning is still an expensive, mostly unreliable pit of disappointment for may people. Even at today's prices, a larger hard drive is still cheaper than Blu Ray for storage. You yourself said your laptop did not meet the requirements for an external BD Burner. Go take a look at the prices for BD blanks and ask yourself if it is worth the risk even IF that laptop only fails one requirement(authoring, watching, etc etc)....especially when there is no database of good or bad discs/manufacturers like there was with blank DVD media.
I've never owned an external CD or DVD burner because of the horror stories I've heard I've heard in the LONG time I've been here.
You came her for an opinion...I gave it to you.

[Hoser Rob]

I'd go even further ... I don't even think dvd's are really that cost effective compared to a usb hard drive, let alone br's. High quality archive-worthy dvd-r's aren't nearly as cheap as the unreliable garden variety ones, plus they're harder to find. You also have to add the cost of some sort or disc storage if you don't want the annoyance of having to sift through stacks on a spindle.

Plus it'd be just a pain in the ass to store on br's ... you'll have to catalogue all that stuff if you store a bunch of videos on one disc ... and much slower than a hard drive too.

I haven't burned to dvd for watching/listening or archiving for some time now. Actually I know a couple of guys who are IT professionals who use netbooks for personal use and they don't mind not having an optical drive one bit.

[jman98]

Well it has nothing with the quality to do, its more a way of saving space if you see my point.

hech54 - I cannot speak for other countries, but the majority of Americans are currently completely and utterly obsessed with "saving space" so this is almost always the reason why someone wants to do this. I'll bet the OP is from the USA.

[usually_quiet]

I'm still burning DVDs. I back up important files on optical discs, and author playable DVDs. I use Verbatim AZO DVD media for reliability. My parents and my sister have DVD players without the ability to play files from a flash drive, so if I record a TV show for them, I have to either use my DVD recorder or author a DVD from a recording on my PC. They lack the hardware and expertise to record TV shows for themselves since TV went digital. Lucky for me, they don't need me to record something for them very often.

Pioneer makes good internal BD burners. I plan to get one of their internal Blu-Ray burners since I have a desktop PC. The only external model from Pioneer is the BDR-XD04, which is a slim drive. It is fairly new and doesn't have many reviews yet. The Samsung SE-506AB/TSBD (Black) or Samsung SE-506AB/TSWD (White) have received mostly positive reviews.

I have always heard that the standard form-factor external optical drives with their own power supply were less prone to problems. It you don't need one that runs off of the laptop's power, the LITE-ON eHBU212-08 gets mostly positive reviews.

In the USA, the cost per GB of quality single-layer BD media is now close to the cost per GB of quality single-layer DVD media. The cost per GB of quality single-layer BD media is less than the cost per GB of quality dual-layer DVD media.

I can't tell you if your laptop can use a BD drive for everything. Your laptop's ability to play commercial Blu-ray discs depends on whether or not it is 100% HDCP compliant and whether its video graphics adapter can assist with H.264 decoding. If you know what software you will use, you should be able to find a list of hardware requirements at the publisher's website.

[Anonymous1]

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[Anonymous1]

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[usually_quiet]

Well the thing is. Its not DATA like files, pictures etc. I will use the BluRay discs for. Not sure if I mentioned it but I recorded several of my old VCR tapes with different content on to my computer and burned it to DVD discs for backup. Since there are a lot of disc up to date I would prefer to put them on less discs if you see my points. Since BluRay was made I suppose for video playback then in my opinion its the right way to put it on BluRay. I do not seek to improve quality or anything since its still in "VCR quality" though the movies are being put on DVDs.

About the catalogue of everything I dont think that would be a problem since most of the clips are already catalogued on the DVD's and there are several DVD's in order that could be put on one BluRay.

So again, I am not looking for any quality improvement, all I want is to reduce my amount of discs if you see my point. I want to know if it is possible to use an external writer for laptop since the requirements I have seen differs from writer to writer I have seen on the net, and some wont let me see any requirements at all. I do not know if the requiremens are for use of the burner itself, for authoring or playback.

I found your other thread. Are you planning to save your VHS captures as .mpg files on the BD media (burned as data), or do you want to author a playable Blu-Ray disc?

If you plan to author a Blu-Ray disc, then you will need to worry about hardware requirements for the authoring software and conversion software, because it looks like you will need to convert the audio for certain, and possibly the video.

If all you are going to do is copy .mpg files to BD media as data, you need software that can losslessly convert from VOB to mpg, which VOB2MPG can do, plus ImgBurn to burn the discs. If your laptop can run those programs a BD burner should work for you, assuming it has drivers for your operating system, and can get enough power from your laptop (if there is no power source other than USB).

[oldfart13]

Actually I know a couple of guys who are IT professionals who use netbooks for personal use and they don't mind not having an optical drive one bit.

They might if they had a virus destroy the config.sys on their netbook and wanted to restore the netbook to some sort of functionality. That was the problem I ran into with a friend's old XP netbook. Pretty hard to use repair discs with no optical drive available and you can't reach the repair partition without one connected. You can use other software to add a Windows OS to a flashdrive but I still couldn't reach the repair partition. Finally gave up and overwrote both with an updated copy of the OS....

[Anonymous1]

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[usually_quiet]

I will not be putting them as data, I want them to be playable in BluRay players for later use so no data storage on the BluRay. For that I will still use DVD discs. Anyway. Thank you for your replies. I suggest myself to buy a faster computer (which I will eventually do in the near future). Say, how is the compability with BluRay and Macintosh computers?

Apple doesn't officially support Blu-Ray . Mac owners still use Blu-Ray drives but have fewer choices when it comes to software than PC owners do.

[redwudz]

The main problem I see with burning BDs from a laptop is the interface, most likely USB 2.0. It 'should' be fast enough, but that's a lot of data to transfer and something might interrupt that transfer. I've had that problem even with burning DVDs from a laptop to a external burner.

You want to burn the videos so they will playback on a set top BD player? If they are in DVD format on a DVD disc, probably. If they are in DVD format on a BD disc, not as likely. So then you would need to convert/repackage them to work with the BD player. I should also mention that a few set top BD players may not recognize burned BD discs.

But I do use BD discs for back up, though only in data format. The cost per MB is actually cheaper than DL DVD blanks. All my videos are converted to MKV (H.264/AC3) format. I play them back with my computers or through a WDTV box to my monitor/projector. Even if my laptop had a BD reader, I doubt it could smoothly play the compressed video.

[[_chef_]]

The first question you need to ask yourself is....Why do you want to put DVDs on to a Blu Ray disc. DVDs are MUCH cheaper, much easier to find blanks with proven quality(Verbatim, Taiyo Yuden) and NOT to make you sound dumb or anything....you know that the quality will NOT improve putting DVD to Blu Ray....right?

And in my opinion....a external Blu Ray burner with a Laptop?
I would not even consider that.....sorry.

Yep, exactly my opinion.

If you really want an external one, get the Samsung SE-506, BUT you need 2 extra usb ports to sustain the necessary power!!!!

[laslarry]

The first question you need to ask yourself is....Why do you want to put DVDs on to a Blu Ray disc. DVDs are MUCH cheaper, much easier to find blanks with proven quality(Verbatim, Taiyo Yuden) and NOT to make you sound dumb or anything....you know that the quality will NOT improve putting DVD to Blu Ray....right?

And in my opinion....a external Blu Ray burner with a Laptop?
I would not even consider that.....sorry.

Hello sorry for interruption but I just join when seen your post.. I use a laptop and burn blu-ray disc with external drive by Pioneer using Usb port I've burned 50gb of data with no problems even after verification.

[fritzi93]

However when I look at the specifications at some of the writers in a local online shop they say the requirements are at 3 Ghz or more.

I suspect that refers to a CPU adequate to run, say, PowerDVD and play encrypted, original Blu-rays.

My first HTPC with a Blu-ray drive had (has) a 2.0 GHZ dual-core CPU (relegated now to the office). PowerDVD complained that my computer wasn't up to the job, although Blu-rays would, in fact, play on it. I had an adequate DXVA video card in the computer, however.

Really though, I'd shy away from external Blu-Ray drives for reasons already mentioned. Better to have an internal drive in a PC desktop.

[[_chef_]]

Really though, I'd shy away from external Blu-Ray drives for reasons already mentioned. Better to have an internal drive in a PC desktop.

You can, but the already mentioned one from Samsung is better than a internal one.
I don't care if you believe me or not.

[orsetto]

What you want to do really isn't practical: BluRay and DVD video standards are just two completely different animals, the only thing the formats share is physical disc size. So taking VHS videos that you've converted to DVD, and putting those DVD files onto a BluRay, is something a minority within a niche within a cult of almost nobody bothers doing. Why? Becuase the BluRay standalone player standard doesn't support ordinary playback of DVD files from a BluRay disc. You can burn the files to a BD, but most BD players will just sit there and do nothing with the loaded disc: they can't understand it. Going by what I've heard from friends on various AV forums, you're left with two options, neither exactly what you want:

You can re-encode all your DVDs into the BluRay video standard, then author/burn BDs that will play like ordinary BDs on any ordinary player. This takes time, and may require more horsepower than your laptop can handle. It may also result in conversion quality loss, not to mention loss of custom chapter points within titles, etc. Doing this doesn't really make efficient use of BD storage capacity, either: in other words, the whole idea is basically pointless.

You can rip your DVDs as ISO files to store on the BDs as data files, preserving 100% quality and most custom navigation you embedded in the DVDs. This makes the best use of BD storage capacity, but of course the discs won't play in most simple consumer hardware: you would need to use your computer as a Home Theater PC to feed your television. Here again, your current laptop is not going to cut it.

There's no easy way out for you: you have to compromise on either storage capacity or broad playback compatibility. You can't have both, and the latter would require a lot of tedious work. You're probably gonna need a new PC to do anything, preferably a desktop that can host an internal BD drive. Using a laptop to author BD is possible, but the selection of optimized external BD drives is limited, chance of glitches increases dramatically, and you might need a more powerful laptop. Maybe someone else here on VH will suggest a new workflow I haven't heard of yet, but AFAIK from the "power users" I've talked to: DVD files and BD-R are like oil and water (they don't mix digitally without conversion).

Unless you're living in a drawer in a Tokyo business hotel, you may as well just stay as you are with your existing DVDs. I have almost 2000 dvds (made from VHS) stored unobtrusively behind a sofa, in stacks of the 50-disc plastic capsules they came in. Would I like to shrink that further, so it all fits on a single closet shelf? Sure, but it isn't worth the trouble for me: making the DVDs in the first place was tedious enough. BD would only be a temporary patch to the future anyway: discs are dying out. You'd eventually end up ripping them to whatever replaces HDDs as an archival high-density storage system. We're all gonna end up using discless media players within ten years anyway.

[Steve(MS)]

Actually one can wrap a dvd compliant file into the blu-ray format and it will play fine.
Multiavchd will do that and author multi-titles also but it is the only freeware software that will do this.
Easybd lite will take a compliant dvd and wrap it into a blu-ray format, it even will do multiple titles but it does not author so
there can be no top menu which takes away from the usefulness of it.
So far, that is the big obstacle to putting dvd files on blu-ray (without re-encoding) since multiavchd can be buggy.

So what you are asking can do done, not sure if your laptop has enough power.
The only way to know for sure is to buy the usb blu-ray burner and experiment.

A better idea might be to change the dvd files to mpg files since by doing this there is no encoding and then play them off a hard drive.