Right, sitting next to the mini during the day or across from it on the couch are not the same thing noise-wise as trying to sleep next to it, especially if one is very sensitive. We have an impeccably quiet ceiling fan, but even its slight hum or whir is audible in the dead of night.
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I also had no trouble ripping my complete library of DVDs (~250 titles) with the stock optical drive.
You wouldn't have, as long as your library was all R0 or purchased within your region. It did take you anywhere from 2 to 4 to 8 times longer to rip them with that stock Matshita, though, because of riplock. Riplock in certain drives can clamp a 16x read down to 2x or 4x. With a few hundred dvds, that can add up: whatever hourly rate you want to assign to your time, productivity-wise a fast firewire external would pay for itself in no time.
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How is the stock drive crippled? I suppose this would affect my ability to treat the Mini as a fancy upscaling DVD player.
well, in addition to 'riplock' you'll find out very quickly that there's nothing "fancy" or "upscaling" about the mini as a dvd player--its performance at least in comparison to standalone upscaling dvd players is average. Still, it's quite nice having one hooked up to your HDTV to pull video_ts files from anywhere on the network from an aesthetics and convenience standpoint. We have two Macs in media extender mode and they're about 60% (high def) and 40% (video_ts) playback at the moment.
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The drive is primarily "crippled" for out of region DVD ripping and playback.
As pdubyu said, this is but one way it's crippled--many, if not most other drives, are initially shipped this way as well. What is particularly troubling about most Apple/Matshita drives, though--again, beyond 'riplock'-- is that 1) the region protection is more robust, and 2) optional firmware for them has not been released or hacked.
It may never affect you as long as you buy everything within your assigned region. But let's say you live in the US, and rather than watch 'Children of Men' in the movie theaters right now or wait 6 months for the US R1 dvd release--you'd prefer to buy the excellent just-released R2 dvd from Amazon.co.uk: we'll you'd be out of luck if the optical drive in your mini was all you had.
With other drives, either connected via firewire or firmware flashed, you'd be able to play it back and/or rip it, no problem.
And we haven't even gotten into the substandard burning qualities of those crappy Matshita drives, which can also be very slow and prickly even with the highest quality dvd media.
