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AlexMaximus

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 15, 2006
1,173
525
A400M Base
Hi,

I have a real nice maxed out G4 MDD 1,42 Dual and I just love to watch DVD's on my 23' screen sometimes.

Since I found this really nice baby here (an external Blue Ray Drive)

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11054

.. I was wondering if I could watch and burn Blue Ray discs on my old rig her ?

Of course I have a USB 2.0 and a Firewire 400 to hook it up. I even would have a firewire 800 left.

Would it work, could I watch Blue Ray disks on my G4 the way I do it now with regular DVD's ??

I think it should and see now reason not to go for it ...

Any experience with that ???

Would be Firewire 400 or USB 2.0 better ??

:):):)
 

OrangeSVTguy

macrumors 601
Sep 16, 2007
4,127
68
Northeastern Ohio
It's rumored that Snow Leopard 10.5.6 will have Blu-Ray support. Nothing currently though. You especially won't be able to play any commercial discs as they have HDCP and no Cinema Display has that. People have been installing BR drives into their Mac Pros and I heard of software to play HD movies. Besides I don't think the dual 1.42 is enough to play/handle 1080p? Does anyone know for sure? Because it requires a lot of processing power.
 

Neurorad

macrumors newbie
Aug 28, 2006
28
0
External Blu Ray

I have a Buffalo external Blu Ray Recorder that works great for data. It was very inexpensive ($249 on sale a few weeks ago) and bought at Circuit City.

http://www.circuitcity.com/ccd/Sear...d=buffalo+blu&searchSection=All&go.x=0&go.y=0

It is a 6X Blu Ray recorder. It uses USB 2.0 - which works without a problem even through a USB hub.

As others have noted, I cannot play Blu Ray movies on my Mac for both a lack of native Mac software and a lack of HDCP, without resorting to ripping the disk in Windows.

The price is a fraction of all the others, yet uses the same Hitachi drive as many other more expensive units.
 

AlexMaximus

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 15, 2006
1,173
525
A400M Base
I have a Buffalo external Blu Ray Recorder that works great for data. It was very inexpensive ($249 on sale a few weeks ago) and bought at Circuit City.

http://www.circuitcity.com/ccd/Sear...d=buffalo+blu&searchSection=All&go.x=0&go.y=0

It is a 6X Blu Ray recorder. It uses USB 2.0 - which works without a problem even through a USB hub.

As others have noted, I cannot play Blu Ray movies on my Mac for both a lack of native Mac software and a lack of HDCP, without resorting to ripping the disk in Windows.

The price is a fraction of all the others, yet uses the same Hitachi drive as many other more expensive units.


Thanks man, thats a real good information. I think I will check out my local CC store.
Since I can not watch the BR movies on my mac I will connect it on the Flat Screen via HDMI connection, that should work....

Thanks!
 

Neurorad

macrumors newbie
Aug 28, 2006
28
0
Only USB, no HMDI output from drive on Buffalo.

The Buffalo Drive is a computer drive, with the only interface being USB. There is no HDMI from the case - like all computer-based Blu Ray drives. It is not a stand-alone player. It can do everything any other computer-based Blu Ray drive can, provided it has the appropriate hardware support (HDCP, etc.).
 

Semiopaque

macrumors regular
Oct 7, 2008
216
40
It's rumored that Snow Leopard 10.5.6 will have Blu-Ray support. Nothing currently though. You especially won't be able to play any commercial discs as they have HDCP and no Cinema Display has that. People have been installing BR drives into their Mac Pros and I heard of software to play HD movies. Besides I don't think the dual 1.42 is enough to play/handle 1080p? Does anyone know for sure? Because it requires a lot of processing power.

I think it has more to do with the graphics processing power than the CPU, though I'm sure that helps. Not totally certain. I'll have an external BD drive ( well, an internal that I'm throwing in a USB enclosure) in a week or so that I can test on my G4 (no idea what software I will use to play it, though). Also have an Asus N10J on the way with an Atom 1.6 GHz that has HMDI out on it that I'm going to test it on. I'd be a bit surprised if a dual 1.4 couldn't play BD disks assuming it had the graphics ability (and software) to display, but I'm definitely no expert on this.
 

avloromano

macrumors newbie
Dec 18, 2009
1
0
Blue Ray OSX + Win 7

I'm looking to add on a blue ray drive external to Mac OS X 10.6.2 runnung Parallel Desktop Windows "007" as IWell in a like to call it. Will I be able to connect a regular blue ray drive to my mac pro, even though it specifies windows? I an running windows on the Mac, so I figure it will, not sure though! I'm running Mac Pro 2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 12GB 1066 MHz DDR3

On top of that, if I was using an external blue ray on a PC lets say, and the BR drive is a USB 2.0 hookup (which they have out for some reason) is the 2.0 transfer eve enough to write BR video Data, let alone watch BR video? thanks - Avi
 
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