R52 compatible bluray drive?

[DanielJamesDavis]

Hi,

I've just bought an R52 and I'm looking at putting a bluray drive into its UltraBay Enhanced bay. However, I keep finding conflicting information about compatibility.

I've found a drive with the model number of 43N3200. Does anyone know if this will be compatible with the bay?

Thanks in advance!

[ZaZ]

It is and I know this because I had that drive on the R60. The R5x and R6x drivers are interchangeable, but if you're getting it for Blu-ray watching purposes, you might want to pass. My R60 had the T7400 dual core CPU and it struggled with Blu-ray watching. The CPU ran between 95-100% during playback. It worked a bit better in XP than Vista, but I can't imagine a R52 with a single core Pentium M doing any better. The drive is a burner so if it's for back ups and such, then maybe it'll work, but an external hard drive would probably more cost effective.

[DanielJamesDavis]

Thank you so much for the reply!

I was primarily interested in the drive for watching movies. High resolution isn't a priority- I would most likely shunt the resolution down to something around 640x480 while watching them. More of a priority is compatibility; my wife replaced her DVD collection at home with Blurays and wants to watch them when we go on our beach trips.

Do you think that they would stutter even with the resolution turned down significantly?

[Neil]

I'm afraid the R52 woiuld struggle with the CPU intensive task of decoding Blu-Ray at any resolution. Your best bet would be to rip the discs at home and convert the movies to a smaller portable format (avi, mp4, etc.), and copy them to the R52 hard drive for playback on the beach. No new hardware is needed that way, just a bit of time to transcode the movies.

[DanielJamesDavis]

Well blargh, I guess that nixes the idea of using this as a little bluray player at the beach.

Such a shame, it seems like a lovely machine for the $55 it cost.

Thank you for all your help.

[Neil]

Plus, by ripping, you wouldn't have to take the disks to the beach with you, risking loss or damage to them. I don't see the downside of using the R52 as a diskless portable movie player. Unless, of course, you don't have a computer with a Blu-Ray drive at home either. Plus the display is not bright enough to use in the sun anyway...

[DanielJamesDavis]

Unless, of course, you don't have a computer with a Blu-Ray drive at home either.

Yes, you are correct on this point. The only bluray player I own is a PS3 (picked it up at a sale for $150 a while back). The wife loves it so I wanted to make her happy by finding one she could take with her.