BluRay and DVD Players

[MedicSN6]

Question for the Hardware Gods

 

Okay, so I am finally going to take the plunge into the BR world now that I have a new entertainment center and a DirecTV HD DVR setup on the way.

 

My main question is should I run both a DVD player (upscaling) and the BluRay player at the same time? My though is that running regular DVDs in the BR player will wear it out or possibly burn it out faster. I know that the life of these are fairly good, but why risk a $100 -$150 piece of kit running DVDs while a $30 player will do the same job?

 

Yes, I will have room for both.

 

The other thing is I have been considering building an HTPC for a long time but until BluRay it was not cost effective because my Dell Studio 1735 has a DVD player and an HDMI output. For all intents and purposes, it is a HTPC, just not in the same format.

Is is possible or even desirable to run an external BluRay drive in an enclosure? If yes an eSATA connection would obviously be the best, but would a USB 2.0+ give enough transfer rate to keep it from lagging?

 

My notebook does not have an eSATA port so it would have to be USB 2.0+. If this is unacceptable, then I will have to justify the cost of building a new HTPC with a BR drive VS. buying a factory BR player (Samsung) and just using the notebook for playing downloaded content and surfing the internets.

 

Thoughts?

[KalXen~SPARTA~]

Just use the same drive for both DVD/BluRay.. I doubt you'll run it dead. If your 4 year old was using it, I'd say keep it seperate, but otherwise I wouldn't bother.

 

Not sure about the enclosure, but I'm sure it would be fine as I have seen them sold that way.

[PANiC]

buy a standalone BR player, use it for dvds and brs otherwise you won't get enough use from it, plus they are cheap enough now. forget using a pc to play br films, get the stand alone, it will save you hassle.

 

use the htpc for digital copies / downlaods / streaming tv etc