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Looking for an external DVD drive

K

Kimi

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 29, 2005
233
0
Newcastle, England/ Stirling Scotland
I'm looking for a new external DVD drive to play R1 DVDs (I'm in the UK, R2). Does anyone have any recomendations for one? I don't need a burnner or anything like that, just something to play the R1 discs. I'm not wanting to pay a great deal for this.

Thanks for help.
 
All DVD Burners that I'm aware of can have their region changed. However after a certain number of changes it will be locked to the final region. I have an external sony DRX-810UL. Its a great burner and can be used either vertically or horizontally.
 
I'm using a NexStar 2 external enclosure with fw & usb and a Pioneer DVR-110B. No problems so far. whole kit cost about $110 canadian........approx £52.
 
OS X will work with most enclosures, but it is usually happier with those that have an Oxford chipset. There's one at SVP that is cheap but it has a Prolific chipset and there's a comment on the page about a user's Mac not being able to work with 2 of these boxes daisychained together.

You could always pick up a second hand combo drive on the cheap and put that in the box, but since they can be had for as little as 20 quid (and SVP have some of these) you may as well get a burner. This will likely burn faster than your internal drive and will take some of the strain off it. If the external craps out you just pick up another, rather than possibly having to get your Mac repaired.

I've been using a Pioneer 110 for a year with no problems. It likes the blank DVDs I put in it, but then I try to stick with those of known quality. Thanks to some friendly people on the net you also have the benefit of being able to upgrade the firmware of Pioneer drives when connected to your Mac by firewire. Lots of other brands are not so user-friendly in this respect.
 
Kimi said:
I'm looking for a new external DVD drive to play R1 DVDs (I'm in the UK, R2).
Click to expand...
If your Mac already has a DVD player, there's no need for an external: Just set System preferences -> CDs & DVDs -> When you insert a video DVD to Ignore, and then use VLC to watch your R1 DVDs...

VLC is even less picky if there's any scratches or other defects on the disc and won't freeze up the whole system like DVD player is known to do.
 
Be sure to install patchburn if you are going with an external burner http://www.patchburn.de/ . If you still want to get an external drive, have a look at this site http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/drivedb/search.drivedb.lasso . Once you've installed a drive, file a report - to help build up the data!

BTW, Apple Superdrives are Pioneer, the original duel layer Superdrive is the DVR-109, the current is DVR-111D. Like any brand, nothings perfect...... especially with generic disks
 
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