External BD burner. Any available ?

I have not checked if external BD burners are available or not, but you could use an external enclosure with an internal BD burner instead. I know there is a wide range of such enclosure available with interfaces ranging from regular USB to both flavors of FireWire, Ethernet, Serial ATA.

You can try the USB enclosures for IDE drives. If you have a SATA burner, you should be able to add connector at the back of your PC for direct SATA connection (still need external case though).

Here's some : 5.25" enclosures

Note : I have not tried it yet.

Here is one external BD Burner that uses a Panasonic drive.

NU HBR258

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827154038

USB enclosures for DVD/RW work ok, but they don't run fast enough for the 16X DVD burning (topping out at 8x) and with 4X BD burners available today (LG has one), the USB enclosure might be a stopgap measure.

There is a USB/SATA version for 3.5" enclosures that I use for my stacks of 500GB SATA drives, and they run much faster from the SATA connector. Unfortunately, SATA 5.25" optical drives are rare, so noone makes the enclosures.

Eventually, the enclosures should all be SATA, that way there is no translation layer between USB and IDE.

I'd personally recomend a firewire enclosure(IEEE1394) over USB, or one that has both. IMO firewire works better for this type of thing.

Actually there are 16x DVD burners on USB 2.0....here is one for example:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827106036

I still recomend firewire if at all possible.

2X BD speed USB would be fast enough. The write throughput of these things also depend on the USB on the host PC too. Sometimes, they go through a hub internal within the PC and that can slow it down further. Typically 100Mbps is easily reachable on USB<->IDE bridge, HDD can even run up to around 25Mbyte/s (which is a good 200Mbps), but that depends on your system.

It also depends on which chipset is used. A couple of years ago, the ALi chipset used for these things don't go anywhere near 200Mbps.

The 480Mbps USB theoretical speed is on paper only, various implementations cause the actual throughput to slow down when you actually measure it. I find that I can only reliably burn to 8X on 16X DVD drives using USB, but that's just my system.

---

Btw, I've burnt a lot of BD-RE, mostly filling up the SL disks, and I've found that the burn speed even via IDE is barely 1X on the RE (due to the rewriting nature) even though the target is 2X, I don't think the USB is going to pose a problem until this part of the performance is understood.

This performance is consistent across the BWU-100A and the panasonic using Roxio & Nero. It usually fluctuates between 0.91X and 1.0x

(I have yet to try a BD-R as I am deathly afraid of $10 coasters).

Alan,

I use a AMS VENUS DS-2512B2BK Aluminum 5.25" USB2.0 External Enclosure for my Lian-Li RH-322 Mobile Rack. Had to mod the DS-2512B2BK to accommodate the mobile rack and I slowed the fan down by using a series resistor. The Venus was designed for CD/DVD (Blu-ray?) drives.

I can not tell any difference in transfer speed using High Speed USB 2 (Venus) to internal IDE drive vs. IDE drive to IDE drive. HHD are Western Digital 7200 RPM drives.

2x BD is comparable to 7x DVD btw

I-O Data BRD-UM2/U Blu-ray USB Burner

http://www.everythingusb.com/i-o_data_brd-um2u.html


AND


LaCie d2 Blu-ray External Burner

http://www.everythingusb.com/lacie_d...ray_drive.html


Enjoy

I had this lying around, so I tried it with my BWU-100A BD-RE burner :

Vantec 5.25" USB enclosure


It works and burns at same speed as the IDE for BD-RE (about 1X on what is targetted to be 2X). It also looks really good with the BWU-100A. Don't know why I didn't try it earlier.

The best thing about it is that it takes a direct PC style AC power cable and needs no external transformer, which shows good industrial design (I really hate those power bricks).

Edit : I know I didn't buy these things for the blinking LEDs, but the blue LEDs on the right side (top if you place it vertically) is the same shade of blue as the blinking LED on the BWU-100A. The blinking blue LEDs looks like it belongs there.

Just a note that PowerDVD 6.6 update will play BD through this USB configuration for the BWU-100A. And as long as your CPU is a faster core2duo or AMD 64 X2 4200, the playback seems to be smooth, you don't even need the nvidia HDCP cards if you use VGA. I am driving a Dell 2405 via VGA using a radeon X1300 with 512MB memory - a cheap commodity card (no HDCP though).

This makes it easier to move the BD burner/player around, but having this as a brick still clashes with the aethetics. Al least it's all black -- meaning if your HTCP was all black, you can hide it in all that blackness.

My personal favorites for media shopping are newegg.com and meritline.com

Other than Akihabara in Tokyo, here's one :
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...NE&N=0&Ntk=all

The verbatim's are 12.99. The lowest price I saw was $9.99, but I can't seem to find it now.

Btw, I currently use BD-RE mainly.

BD-RE is rewritable

^ BD-RE is erasable and reusable, and given the bugy state of software now, BD-RE can be used for prototyping first until it is perfect and then it can be archived onto BD-R forever. BD-RE is only about $3 more, should be used more until BD-R prive goes down.

BD-R can be written once only.

Alan,

Here's what I did.
1. updated the PowerDVD 6.6 (BD) on the cyberlink site.
2. upgraded to PowerProducer 4.
3. Installed the patch from Jan '07.
4. Use videoredo to split the mpg file into smaller chunks. (Could not get chapter points to work reliably, only title breaks work).
5. I use only BD-RE's from Sony and Fuji so far. I lost two philips BD-R blanks because of software bugs in roxio's burning apps.
6. The BDAV disk burnt this way plays on the PS3, samsung and Panasonic.

Alan,

There's also this site for people to update the sw that came with the burner : http://sony.storagesupport.com/BDupgrade/

The PowerDVD 6.6 BD patch is in there somewhere (follow the links to the cyberlink download it eventually asks for the cd key - just provide the one that came with the burner).

If you register the cyberlink sw, you should get email telling you the location of an upgrade to PowerProducer 4.0 for existing users (it costs $40), there's also patches for existing software that may or may not work. I used this location for the patches (but newest download could already have the patch).

http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/downl...hes_3_ENU.html

--- btw, I still can't run LXG on the PC, but haven't spent too much time investigating that, between the office, watching movies and reading AVSFORUM and making my own BD-RE home movies, there's not enough hours of leisure time to spend on tracking down why a movie doesn't play on my PC.

I just got the Sony Burner and upgraded to Power DVD Ultra which has all the fixes incorporated. Sure its another $99 but everything works like a charm now. The power dvd that comes with the drive is crippled and not worth much except for headaches.

Suzook,

When I put in LXG, sometimes I get the FBI screen, other times it just freezes with a black screen. All other movies I tried work fine. I suspect it is the Java thing.

Thanks for the info. I'm going to wait a while longer to see if other titles have problems on the PC besides LXG.