Does anyone know where to find a reasonably priced external blu ray burner and/ or the software required to complete the process?
What do you consider reasonably priced? You may have been better off asking for the least expensive and start from there. I've seen internal as low as $99.00 USD but they're 1st gen and pretty slow. Add $50.00 or more for an external (or add your own enclosure). Newegg has only one and it's $194.00. With regard to: " . . software required to complete the process? " Most writers (all retail versions that I've ever seen) come with burning software. Anything beyond that (i.e. authoring, source file creation, etc.) is the user's responsibility.
Don't buy the LiteOn burner. I purchased one and made only 5 BD backups and it died on me. Because I lost the receipt LiteOn would not honor the manufacturing warranty and left me to rot with it. They wouldn't even repair it if I paid for labor. They have the absolute worst customer service I've ever seen! They only have a tech support line and for all other inquiries you have to email them and they take avg 48 hrs to reply. UNREAL! Spend an extra couple bucks and get a Pioneer or LG. In regards to software - check out BD-Rebuilder made by jdobbs. It works great and all of the instructions can be found on AfterDawn (one of the first sticky threads in the blu-ray forum or search for "BD-Rebuilder") Cheers
Why are you blaming Lite-On because YOU lost the receipt? ". . . yeah, but I know where all of my warranty receipts are!" Mike Myers as "Middle Aged Man"
GOOD FOR YOU! LiteOn has bad customer service. If you lose your receipt any other company will charge you a labor fee but LiteOn says "they do not repair any of their blu-ray writers at this time". Does that make any sense to you at all?
Second - what kind of burner dies after 5 burns? I had several other DVD writers that I used to make 2000+ backups and never had a problem.. That alone speaks for itself.
I just purchased this: BUFFALO MEDIA STATION (BRHC-6316U2)$199.99 HIGH DEFINITION COMBO BLU-RAY BURNER/PLAYER AND HD PLAYER (TURBO/USB). Comes with NERO 8 Essentials Suite 3. Made in JAPAN. Burns BLU-RAY @ up to 6x speeds with TURBO/USB enabled. I purchased mine from BUY.COM .