I think I need a DVD player to connect to my replacement laptop. I have a pile of old DVD’s and CD’s I’ll get around to ripping onto the laptop and portable disc storage . Or possibly just playing the odd one directly on the pc.
I’m fussy about quality, within reason, and don’t mind a higher storage for the bigger files that will result from selecting some to rip at a bit higher quality.
HDMI, USB-C needed. Would prefer bluray as backwards compatible to DVD/CD. I’d prefer to buy in France or Europe, but if better choice or vastly better pricing, am prepared to have sent or fetch from UK when I next make it back.
I’m also likely to think about using it for backups, so as to have a different medium as well as portable disc drives.
So mostly reading from it, some writing.
Has anyone got a favourite manufacturer or model of dvd/bluray/cd player l I should look at for quality and reliability?
Not much help in answering your question, but your post made me reflect on how ‘far’ we’ve travelled in terms of data storage.
I entered in’88 with Quantel Paintbox images being temporarily stored on a framestore before being copied onto a 35mm slide for outputting as a Cibachrome photograph. Of course for smaller stuff we had floppy disks -which were known as ‘stiffies’ in S Africa (some misunderstanding the first time my secretary asked me if I had one). I still have some stuff on VHS and of course lots of DVDs. Several laptops ago put all my software onto an external drive and continue to work happily with MS Word and Photoshop from the first decade of the century.
I see John and the ancient one have chipped in while I was typing this.
The DVD reader that you buy is not, broadly speaking, going to impact the quality when watching or ripping DVDs - its job is to read the disk and send the bits to the PC
Unless you have Bluray disks that you want to watch or rip I wouldn’t advise buying a Bluray capable drive - unless you plan to buy new disks (and why bother when streaming servces are *much* more convenient) it will be a waste of time and money as external USB Bluray drives are a fair bit more expensive than DVD drives.
Putting “lecteur dvd usb c” into Amazon’s search (or Google’s) brings up plenty of possibilities.
What will determine the quality is the format and codec that you use for storage, DVD used MPEG2 which is now very dated and does not achieve very high compression compared with more modern ones such as MPEG4 (H.264) or HEVC (H.265) - the latter will get most DVD’s down to less than 1GB with ease.
You will need separate software to rip the DVD, Handbrake is excellent though maybe slightly complicated, you will also need to install libdvdcss to read encrypted (i.e most) DVDs.
Yes, my older lenovo had an integrated dvd which stopped working a few years ago. I couldn’t find any more updated drivers, and was unsure whether an o/s update hadn’t actually brought in a driver with an as yet unsolved fault. Never got around to revisiting to see if a better driver did come along later. So that old dvd could have a hardware fault, or could have just been driver error (not unknown on that lenovo previously). That laptop failed and eventually it was simpler to replace as it was very long in the tooth by them.
The new lenovo has just 1 usb C, I think an hdmi out. I’ll get around to getting a usb c hub but hoping to find a usb c dvd player/writer soonish, as one device at a time works currently.
The last time I looked blu ray players weren’t much more anymore than standard dvd, I do come across old dvd’s of stuff that can’t count on finding downloadable (and often the quality of downloading from the internet works out poor) and occasionally a blu ray that looks interesting.
@Ancient_Mariner that’s what I’m looking to do with my existing cd/dvd collection one day when I’m bored in winter.
I can’t remember what software I used to rip my last batch of DVD’s but it wasn’t Handbrake - it was an Asian-origin thing with various download and video-handling bits and was excellent - might have been called VLC?
I do. In fact I wrote an 8” floppy drive test program which the engineers colloquially called “scully test” My payment was a bottle of single malt from the engineering director.
I went into a client some years later on a totally unrelated matter and introduced myself and he said, ahhh, Scully test
My recollection of the dratted things is that I could not write a software loop which was fast enough to read an 8" floppy connected to a WD 1771 controller for a 2MHz Z80 - the code went something like
LD C, DATAPRT
LD HL BUFFER
LD B, 128 (sector length)
L1 IN A, (STATUSPRT) ; 11 t states
AND BITMASK ; 6 (byte ready ?)
JR Z, L1 ; 12 if taken, 7 if not
INI ; 16 (read data, inc HL, dec B)
JR NZ, L1 ; 12 if taken, 7 if not
Forgive the fact that I can’t quite remember Z80 assembler syntax, you’ll get the idea - the quickest you can get round the loop is 11+6+7+16+7 t states - a total of 47 or 23.5μs at 2MHz - 8" floppies have a bit rate of 500KHz - 8 bits takes 16μs to come off the disk. The keen eyed will note that 16μs is less than 23.5μs which means that it is an impossible task. A 4MHz Z80 is (just) fast enough.
for VLC, certainly an excellent tool to watch DVDs