On Fri, 26 Jun 2015 18:18:45 -0400 gottl...@nyu.edu wrote: > My new (dell E7450) laptop will be a slimline with no internal optical > drive. So I want to purchase an external optical drive. My first > thought was to get a drive that is both > a blue ray READER and > a dvd writer > > I naively thought that USB is USB so any such drive would work. > However googling (especially linux sites) shows pages devoted to DRM > issues. Although I do not intend to rip or write a blu-ray, the > number of pages devoted to DRM seem to indicate more pain than gain > for the few times I might read a blu ray.
I have zero experience with blu-ray, so obviously I'm compelled to have an opinion instead :) Blu-ray feels to me like a technology that was obsolete when it hit the market as a consumer product. I remember being hot to buy the hardware when it was introduced, but it was way too expensive back then. By the time the price became reasonable, I realized that I wasn't using even the dvd burners I already owned because disk space was so cheap I was archiving to disk (redundantly, of course) instead of to dvd. One use-case I've never needed, though, is to burn 25 gigs of stuff so I can hand it or snail-mail it to someone instead of sending it over the internet. I just don't need it. I can imagine being required to use blu-ray by an employer or customer, though.
