DescentBB

Just thought i would drop by here, as i'm in need of a new optical drive for my PC. I currently have a dusty old CD/DVD drive, capapble of burning cds, but not DVD's. And I feel i really need to upgrade to a DVD burner, (especially since i have LOADS of home movies i need to get onto DVD now). But i was thinking, is it worth getting a Blu-ray drive now? Its still pretty new technology. EVERYone has a DVD system in there front rooms, Blu ray, just hasnt got around enough yet.

if you can buy a DVD burning and BLU burner drive, then that would be great i guess. if such a thing exists, can anyone recommend one?

Thanks in advance.

I have this one in my media/tv machine, works great for playing Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies. It's not a BD-burner, but it's perfect for movies and considerably cheaper than buying a PS3 or dedicated Blu-Ray player.

The price of a Blu-Ray burner is still just not acceptable, although they are starting to dip down to the $200 range so market adoption should start picking up for the extreme high end crowd. The regular mid/high end crowd will continue to ignore them till they are at or below $100. At this point both the burners and the blank media are simply too expensive to be worth it compared to DVDs.

At $6.50 a disk and $200-$250 for the burner there really is no contest compared to DVDs which are pennies for the disk and $30 for a great burner. For $65 you can get 10 BD-R disks with a total capacity of 250 GB in the pack, or you can buy over 250 DVD+R disks and store over 1 TB. And unless you filmed your home movies with an expensive high definition camera, there is no valid reason to get Blu-Ray for home video.

Also it helps that a modern 16-22x CAV DVD burner can spit out a full disk in 5 minutes or less on good media, a Blu-Ray burn is going to take a lot longer. Eventually Blu-Ray will beat DVDs in price per capacity, but not for a good while.

I don't even know if my setup will play BD with all the DRM garbage flying around. I don't care to bother finding out with the prices the way they are either.

If you are worried about playing back blu-ray with all the rampant DRM in the system, I highly suggest getting yourself a copy of AnyDVD-HD or some other regularly updated program to automatically circumvent copy protection. Its about the only reliable way to play back legal disks you own on a PC, especially if it is a disk from Disney.

Yes, I noticed that from Disney. (Regular DVD, anyway). DVDShrink wouldn't cut it, but DVDDecrypter does.

Wow, thanks for the fast reply guys, i think ill just get a mid range DVD burner then. Sweet,