Can a Blue Ray player be used as an optical drive for a computer?
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From: me on 18 Jan 2010 19:10 I'm thinking of buying a laptop that does not have a built in optical drive. No big deal as I seldom use them..... but still need one occasionally to load software onto the laptop hard drive. Being somewhat frugal, I was wondering if I could use my Blue Ray player as a "drive" for the laptop if needing to load software on it(laptop)??
From: Adrian C on 18 Jan 2010 19:30 On 19/01/2010 00:10, me(a)privacy.net wrote: > Being somewhat frugal, I was wondering if I could use > my Blue Ray player as a "drive" for the laptop if > needing to load software on it(laptop)?? Yes. You have to remove the cabinet screws, desolder components, reassemble them in another order so it will work, resolder, add some custom wire cables, rewrite the firmware and then you are done. To revert to working as a blueray player, simply do the above in reverse. On the other hand, Internal CD/DVD drives for laptops are pretty cheap, maybe $20 or so. -- Adrian C
From: Bob Villa on 19 Jan 2010 07:34 >My own blu-ray video player has a standard Matsushita PC drive inside. It's unusually a PATA drive and on investigation it turned out to be a Blu- ray burner even though the player itself has no burning capability. If we were sure of the model and its burning capability...that would be a good savings! My Panasonic Blu-Ray player was $125. bob_v
From: Ian D on 19 Jan 2010 22:31 <me(a)privacy.net> wrote in message news:t3u9l59lq33fitd5njcb7cqqj0uk99900d(a)4ax.com... > I'm thinking of buying a laptop that does not have a > built in optical drive. No big deal as I seldom use > them..... but still need one occasionally to load > software onto the laptop hard drive. > > Being somewhat frugal, I was wondering if I could use > my Blue Ray player as a "drive" for the laptop if > needing to load software on it(laptop)?? I think you're asking if you can use your home theatre Blue Ray drive as an external drive for installing applications onto a laptop. Some Blue Ray players have LAN and WiFi connections, but I don't know if they can be used to read PC data DVDs or CDs so that applications could be copied via network to a PC hard drive for installation from the hard drive. You would have to check the documentation for your drive. If it's not workable, you can get a good USB2 external DVD/CD rewriter for under $100. LG makes reasonably priced external drives.
From: Bob Villa on 20 Jan 2010 07:40
>It should be noted that USB2 is not fast enough to run a blu-ray drive/burner at its full speed. USB3 or Firewire is required for that. But USB2 is adequate for video. Although USB2 is listed as being faster...in practice...Firewire is only slightly faster than USB2. bob |