Customer Reviews

Blu-Ray USB External Player DVDRW

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

This has proved to be an excellent solution to backing up Blu Ray discs to my iMac. OS X will naively recognize it and you can use readily available third party software to extract nice mkv files. The device appears of good quality and I believe it's an unmarked Panasonic / Matsushita. I think this is great because Apple uses Matsushita CD/DVD drives in many of their models. Highly recommended.

for $100 this is a great Blu-Ray reading and DVD-burning slim portable drive.
It will power itself right off of USB so you don't need any other connectors. I've seen much more expensive drives from lenovo or HP that are just as nice and don't do blu-ray.

My only complaint is more about blu-ray itself. First you need to purchase some sort of software (cyberlink or Intervideo WinDVD) but specifically a version that supports blu-ray, which is a little bit more expensive as nothing comes with the drive that can play blu-ray out of the box. Additionally, you will need a fairly recent generation computer to play the blu-ray disks effectively. I've used it on a machine with a GMA965 but the video is a bit choppy, however on my T500 with the Discrete Radeon HD card that will switch down to the Intel 4 series chip when not busy. Playing blu-ray disks always pounds on the radeon, anything less than a Radeon HD or very new 9 series nVidia will probably have a hard time, or might not even play a blu-ray disk at all. So make sure you have something that can play the disks.

In all honesty, I will probably replace my computer before I replace this drive as it is a really useful and versatile optical drive

Works great ...
Note that the "more details" say that it is Model: Panasonic UJ-220
but the system information of the one I received says that it is a FUJITSU

Works great but I did need "AnyDVD HD" installed in order to be able to use it.

Update:

I purchased the following power adapter found here at Amazon.

ZipLinq AC NEW/ver. Charger to USB Conv

I believe it can supply up to 150-450 mA output if required.

Mine works without the supply but I still use the 5.0 VDC.
I have used both for about a week now and using the external power supply did no harm.

Why over tax the laptop ...

Update number 2.

When the reader was transfering a large amount of data to the USB external drive,
on two different occasions, I got an ERROR in the middle of the operation. Note that BOTH times, I was NOT using
the ZipLinq AC NEW/ver. Charger to USB Conv.

Since then I use the AC to USB power adapter EVERYTIME and have NEVER had a problem since.

Thus I would purchase again the "ZipLinq AC NEW/ver. Charger to USB Conv"
here at amazon.

What a bargin. I bought this for my desktop replacement laptop (Vista) that is 3 years old so I can watch Blu-ray movies on it. I will also use it to load software on my 2 netbooks. It is plug and play. Be aware that it has 2 USB 2.0 connections, one for the data, the other for the power. There is no free Blu-ray software. You can download demos of the newest versions of PowerDVD (30 day) and Arcsoft's TotalMedia (15 day). Be aware that the TotalMedia demo only has DTS sound so most movies will have no sound in the menus, but will have sound in the movie. DTS is less compressed then Dolby so most newer movies have DTS soundtracks. I went with the TotalMedia software, they have frequent sales of up to a 1/3 off. TotalMedia will also play HD-DVD discs. My laptop has an HD-DVD drive. While I have tried regular and Blu-ray discs, I have not used the drive for anything else yet. Overall its a great player for the price. The only quirky thing about it is that you really have to push the tray in to close it. Other then that, its silent and does the job.

Just make sure you buy it for under 150, not the seller who has it going for 10 times that amount.

I purchased this drive expecting a cheap plug and play and thank goodness those were my expectations as there was ZERO documentation to help the problems that were to arrise. I plugged it in and presto, it showed up in My Computer. FANTASTIC! I put a DVD in, and it disappeared from My Computer. Minutes, ovr an hour passed and nada. Removed the DVD and there it was again. I tried multiple dics on multiple platforms (CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray) but nothing read.

I began searching for drivers in hopes I could find something since like I said there was zero documentation (no links to websites, support forums, just nothing). As I began to search around not only could I find a newer driver (2006) but others running Windows 7 were searching for drivers as well. It seems it's incompatible, after reading various user experiences and some of the other reviews here at amazon that were buried I decided to return the item for a more expensive drive.

I've since purchased this from Amazon: Asus USB 2.0 Slim External 6x Blu-Ray Writer SBW-06C1S-U

This one is twice the price but it is from a trusted brand name and it is a writer as well. Hopefully it fairs better.

I'm hoping this review will save someone in my same position the time wasted on this drive.

I would prefer to purchase content digitally from iTunes, but Apple does not allow purchased video to be streamed via AIrVideo, etc. - lame. The alternative is to purchase Blu-ray discs and rip them, so I needed an inexpensive drive to do this. Fist off, it is REALLY lame of other folks to ding this drive on reviews because it does not come with software. Do your homework folks. That's like buying a car, realizing it does not come standard with Nav, and ripping the auto manufacturer.

I just received the drive last night, downloaded MakeMKV for free (2-click software BTW), and had the first Blu-ray disc ripped to my HD in full 1080p within 30 minutes. Currently using HandBrake to encode as 720p m4v file to play on AppleTV.

For others doing the same, here are instructions for above:

1. Rip with MakeMKV (load Blu-ray, click Blu-ray disc icon, hit Make MKV)
2. Open the .mkv file you want to transcode in Handbrake (largest file - should be ~24-30GB)
3. Select the Apple TV preset at right
4. Click Picture Icon at top
5. Set Anamorphic to none
6. Change the picture size to 1280 by 720
7. Check framerate with MediaInfo app (SourceForge). If 23.xxx, use "same as source". If >24, set to 24.
8. Set bit rate to 5000 for the video
9. Click on the Audio tab and if the source is AC3, leave as is; if it's DTS, disable track 2
10. Click Start

Very happy with purchase. Quality Blu-ray drive for the price.

Jimbo

This is an inexpensive blu-ray player that does exactly what it is suppose to do. The player I received was black, although it seems others have received white ones as well. I think mine is an LG brand. Anyway, as others have stated, the drive comes with a unlabeled CD with older Cyberlink programs (software to play and rip a blu-ray disc). The software did not work out of the box, but it has a free upgrade and after installing that, I had no problem playing blu-ray movies. Just finished Lord of the Rings, extended version on blu-ray without a problem. Not sure why other reviews state that you need to buy third party software to use this drive, but you don't. The software on the disc will work fine after downloading the upgraded version. For the record, I'm using a 13 inch laptop with a U7300 1.3 Ghz Intel processor and 4G of RAM running Windows 7.

I have a couple of copies of each blu-ray I own, backed up on a hard drive. Easy as can be. I use dvdfab and make a complete copy of it. I have an ancient laptop which does just fine with both usb cables plugged in, but it does take an hour or so for a complete copy.

Always leery of 3rd party providers to Amazon, I watched this order carefully. However, it shipped sooner than estimated and arrived quickly and, although the USPS envelope was damaged, the unit was not. Because there was zero documentation, I just plugged the 2 USB2.0 cables into my Win 7 laptop, used Win 7 drivers, started up Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra 10 I had already purchased from Cyberlink, and immediately was watching Blu-Ray movies. I tried 7 different movies before I was comfortable it was a good purchase. I could find no mfg name, model no., or s/n on or inside the unit so it must be some kind of OEM device. While there was no documentation, there was a Memorex CD without a label. Using Windows Explorer I could see the disc contained software but no general Readme or user guide. Within some folders a Readme allowed me to figure out that the following was on the CD as well as stuff I never did identify:
DX9.exe (? unknown)
Cyberlink CD/DVD Label Printer Swr 2007
Cyberlink Power2Go CD/DVD Writer Swr 2007
Cyberlink Power Backup 2 Swr 2007
Cyberlink Power Ultra BD/DVD Player Swr 2007
Cyberlink Power Producer 4.0 Video Production Swr
Power Producer Template Swr
Power Setup (?)

I didn't load any of this software because I didn't know what it was and I had already purchased PowerDVD Ultra 10 that included Power2Go 10. I have not tried writing to this device as I really only wanted it to watch Blu-Ray movies on my laptop. For my purposes, it is working well, although I would have liked to see at least a 1-page user guide. As advertised, the unit is slim, small and will fit easily in my laptop backpack. I will be watching movies on my next flight.

I needed an external blu-ray reader so that I could back up my growing collection of blu-ray disks and to access them through my home media device.

This unbranded (Although probably Panasonic or Matsushita) drive has excelled since I bought it. I use this drive connected to a MacBook Pro and use MakeMKV to allow me to rip the disk to an MKV file. From there I am able to shrink the file some but by that point the blu-ray drive's job is already done.

The drive performs beautifully, it's extremely quiet and doesn't heat up to the touch. So far in the few weeks use it has worked 100% of the time, with no ripping failures.

A couple of points not particularly clear in other reviews:

This drive is connected using TWO cables, both connect to USB ports on your computer, one s for power, the other is for data. Both need to be connected at the same time so you need two free USB ports. Other have mentioned using an external adapter to provide power so that only one USB port is taken up on your computer which is perfectly acceptable too.

Although the read speed is shown at 2X the drive I received has been performing almost twice as quickly when ripping a blu-ray.

Using a MacBook Pro I installed no software for the device. I simply plugged it into to my USB ports, opened up MakeMKV and off I went. Outstanding.


I can't recommend this drive highly enough for the setup I have, obviously performance may be different with other PCs and operating systems.