Bluray player for XBMC on the PC

[BlueMR2]

Hi everyone, i'm thinking of getting a Bluray drive up to £50 for my (hopefully still working) PC.

I have alot of my DVD's on the computer so i can watch them with XBMC, i am thinking of putting on some of my blurays as well so i can watch the high def films. In the future i can imagine more blurays being purchased, so it will hopefully get used in the future although i use the ps3 at the moment.

I have my DVD's stored as MKV files in the standard quality but with extra languages etc removed to save space.

Is a blu ray backup mkv a suitable format for XBMC to play, and can an external usb2 drive provide enough data to play it properly?

[Trustmeimadoctor]

yes and yes BUT you would be better off going internal

be aware that some drive are locked so they will only rip blurays slowly

[MagicalTrevor]

I think you can use makemkv with a couple of tweaks for Blu-ray but I've not done it nor do I have the ability to test this out.

Depending on the CPU in your HTPC would you maybe be better getting an internal drive for a separate PC?
I was considering getting a Revo (Atom dual-core) and then getting a blu-ray drive for my i5 games machine to rip blu-rays to MKV.

Trustmeimadoctor said:

be aware that some drive are locked so they will only rip blurays slowly

That's interesting, can you tell me more?

[BlueMR2]

MagicalTrevor said:

That's interesting, can you tell me more?

It seems some drives are riplocked and the read rate of video br's is limited.

I will probably get some internal drives and possibly a small server to serve them round the house but until i get a job i don't have the funds for that so they will stay on the external drives for now.

[MagicalTrevor]

BlueMR2 said:

It seems some drives are riplocked and the read rate of video br's is limited.

I will probably get some internal drives and possibly a small server to serve them round the house but until i get a job i don't have the funds for that so they will stay on the external drives for now.

Thanks