Internal Blu-ray drive into caddy/enclosure info please.

PeteHerts

Hello.
Anybody got any ideas what internal Blu-ray drive and caddy/enclosure go best with eachother for a USB or Firewall connection to a laptop please?
I've already got the Toshiba £50 HD-DVD player and I've got an HDMI connection from my laptop to TV so I thought this would be the cheap way of playing Blu-ray (well this is a money saving site :rotfl: )
Many thanks in advance.
Pete.

setec

had simlar idea but also trying to bypass latop since blu ray player for pc are cheap can get caddy for £17 http://svp.co.uk/products-solo.php?pid=370&ref=froogle&ci_src=18615224&ci_sku=5041

then convert from usb ouput to dvi and from dvi to hdmi
http://www.cableuniverse.co.uk/catalog/cables/usb-to-HDMI-DVI.html

the only thing is audio which would have to be transferd via headphone socket on front of player so may lose sound quality.
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?TabID=1&DOY=3m5&ModuleNo=31700&criteria=
may solve issue but untested

overall after purchase should cost about £160 with blu ray player and most will allow for playing hd format aswell

superscaper

Wouldn't connecting it to USB or Firewire create a bottleneck? Kind of defeats the point of the HDMI connection to the TV if you've got a significantly slower data flow from the drive to the laptop.

dc

You can get bare LG Bluray Roms for around £80 that play both BD and HD dvds as well as being normal dvd writers. ( BD writers are around £160 but prices dropping).
Any £15 to £30, 5.25" external usb/Firewire enclosure should do.
But you will need very good graphics card.

gnatschuffed

dc wrote: »

You can get bare LG Bluray Roms for around £80 that play both BD and HD dvds as well as being normal dvd writers. ( BD writers are around £160 but prices dropping).
Any £15 to £30, 5.25" external usb/Firewire enclosure should do.
But you will need very good graphics card.

You don't need a powerful graphics card for movie playback as most of the processing is done by the CPU. As you're going to use bluray, then you'll need power dvd ultra (or similar). A cheap dual core processor is recommended but for the graphics card, stick with a cheap (quiet) one that can handle HDCP over DVI/HDMI. Check quietpc etc. for suggestions or the graphics card forum over at overclockers.

Nilrem

superscaper wrote: »

Wouldn't connecting it to USB or Firewire create a bottleneck? Kind of defeats the point of the HDMI connection to the TV if you've got a significantly slower data flow from the drive to the laptop.

The data from the drive is fairly small (very low) compared to to the amount needed for the display - in part because the data on the drive is highly compressed and doesn't need to have every pixel (in all 3 colours) stored for every frame (unlike the output which requires every pixel/colour for several million pixels be updated 24-60 times a second).

Basically you only need a few MB/S data from the storage device for HD playback*, it's the output side that requires huge amounts of bandwidth (IIRC HDMI when running at 720p or 1080i/p uses gigabytes of bandwidth per second).
Any half decent USB2 or firewire drive enclosure should easily manage that :

As for the output, the thing to watch is that if your laptop/PC do not have native HDMI ports, that the DVI port supports HDCP (the copy protection part of the HDMI standard, as HDMI is basically DVI with an audio connection and HDCP support), if it doesn't you may have problems with disks refusing to playback - one of the things that HDMI is meant to do is to reduce piracy, and it does that by trying to ensure that the content is/can be encrypted at all points between the disk and display.

If your graphics card doesn't support HDMI/HDCP you can get ones that do pretty cheaply now (IIRC the Ati 2xxx series cards all support it, and start at about £30, and have dedicated support for HD decoding, which helps if your CPU is an older one).



*From what I can see it's about 36mbits (about 4MBytes) a second.