With prices of Blu-Ray Burners falling for PC's I may get one soon. I'm looking at one of the models that's approximately $250 and plan to put it in an external case so I can connect it to any of my computers via USB. The problem is the blanks. I would mostly use BD-R, not BD-RE and probably mostly 25GB, not 50GB. I have looked at Meritline and SuperMediaStore. I would be willing to buy a case of approximately 20-30 blanks, maybe even 50 if the price is right but about the cheapest I have found is $3.59 each. I also don't know which brands are best to choose. Does anyone know of a place to get quality BD-R's at a price lower than this?
Western Digital makes a device called WDTV. You can load up your DVDs, BluRays, Mpegs, and Jpegs on an external drive and the WDTV will play any of them on your TV. This way you can screen movies before you know whether you want to make a copy of them or not.
I've been pondering the same, trouble is, the blanks still are not very cheap and considering that most of the BLuray's I have ripped are 30 gig+ you can't just burn the image to a 25 gig disc and shrinking methods sometimes only remove a few gig. Sometime up to 8 / 10 gig. That means you need the 50 gig discs. Ouch!! Also, Binmax, Your off topic response does'nt help much, when the poster will need to rip the bluray to his hard drive(s) to either use the device you suggest or to burn the image to a blank disc. Then he might aswell connect the PC to an LCD and play the ISO file by mounting it in a virtual drive. Who needs a WDTV box for Bluray or DVD's?? HTPC's or decent desktops that can be used similarly to a HTPC are much more usefull than a WDTV box.
Okay Byngo, I understand if you have unlimited funds and can build an HTPC, than of course there are always better methods to anything. But what I was trying to say was, you can save money with this $100 box and can play many video formats without buying a $250 bluray player or hooking your computer up to your TV thats on the other side of the house. Some people only have a 19" computer monitor and would prefer to watch their movies on a 50" in there basement. I have no need to bring my computer into my living room so my kids can destroy it either.
