I'm considering adding a Blu-ray burner to my Debian system, and am soliciting recommendations as to the make/model of the hardware, or the answers to the following questions: 1. Does the hardware, in fact, matter? I. e., I've googled and found some links that indicate the Blu-ray burner is handled just like any other DVD player. Is this true? 2. Will any burner be a multi-layer burner (50 GB instead of 25GB)? Is the number of layers just a function of the media you buy, or do you need to be careful in the purchase of the burner as well? I don't find this listed very much in the H/W specs. 3. Although primarily for backups and off-line storage, it would be really nice to be able to watch Blu-ray movies as well. Is this just a far-out dream, considering DRM, etc.? TIA anw
To be honest, I don't have any experiences with Blue-ray burners yet. Maybe someone else can jump in?
Hey, Falko, thanks! You seem to be the guy that answers most of my questions. I've found a few sites: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/BluRayAndHDDVD http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/ http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/linux/DVD+RW/Blu-ray/ The first seems to indicate you can watch movies, but you have to put on your poodle suit and jump through flaming hoops to do it (sometimes, I guess). The movie part is somewhat secondary to me, since the real reason I'm looking at this is because my backups have finally outgrown my DVD burner. The second two seem to indicate that a Blu-ray burner is pretty much transparent to the CD/DVD tools that come with most distros, except for an odd statement at the end of second that indicates Blu-ray itself doesn't support file sizes > 4 GB, which is strange considering most HD movies are far larger. There's some meanderings about extents, and that it is the extent size, not the file size, that's limited to < 4GB, but I'm not sure what an "extent" is and how it relates to a "block size" or a file. At any rate, all you'd have to do to overcome this for backup purposes is use split, but I don't know how you'd store a large HD movie.
