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Canada, Ottawa
1 Level
718 Review
42 Karma

Review on πŸ’Ώ High-Performance SEA TECH Aluminum External USB Blu-Ray Writer Super Drive for Apple MacBook Air, Pro, iMac by Alejandro White

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Works well, looks good and is very portable

Highly recommended. It works fine on my MacBook Pro Mid 2012 (i7 Quad Core running OS X 10.8). I plugged it in and it worked great, no drivers installed and all my existing software recognized the drive and worked as expected. How: Works right out of the box (no drivers required) Very small Very light weight Great for laptop users who need to carry it around No power adapter required (and not included) USB 2.0 cable included (it's one of those special dual head cables, if you have one If you have an older computer that cannot provide enough power from a USB port, simply plug the other vine into a different USB port, unlike other Blu-ray drives on the market, that second cable is quite long to accommodate that other side of the laptop, for those with a USB port on each side (on my MacBook Pro I've only used one port and have successfully burned dozens of perfectly working drives). The solid aluminum chassis appears to be able to withstand a lot of abuse and remains in excellent condition Attractive (it's a solid piece of aluminum machined on the outside to accommodate the drive) The drive has a black front and a white plastic back. (The drive is a traditional tray-loading design.) Reliable performance with heavy daily use (I've used it extensively every day since I bought it, in fact it works so well that I can back up all my archived data, and it works very well ). A very reasonable price considering you get a drive that can read and write Blu-ray, DVD and CD; very nice solid aluminum body, seamless and well finished) and USB cable 2. The only thing I don't like is the machined aluminum edges. They never cut me, but they don't have the finished feel of my MacBook Pro's aluminum edges, which were never sharp. oddities. Almost all Blu-ray drives, including this one, play Blu-ray movies at a maximum speed of 2X (instead of the nominal 6X). This is by design (Panasonic says this is to reduce drive noise when watching movies, so keep that in mind to set your expectations straight. If you're working with data, their own software for Play Blu gets you the full 6th generation -x speed -ray movies from a Blu-ray disc This applies to all operating systems (there are some expensive Windows PCs with an added Blu-ray option that can play Blu-ray discs out of the box), but Windows does they don't, they just install additional third party software for you and charge a fortune for it, it's a lot cheaper to get that disc and download the free software yourself). Until recently, you had to pay for secondary software to play Blu-ray movies, but that is no longer the case, check here for details (read the entire post before making a decision). Notes: Although this page Saying Apple Doesn't Support Blu-ray is misleading. No computer manufacturer supports Blu-ray, you always need to buy your own Blu-ray player software to play Blu-ray (including Windows. Sometimes some devices are sold with a package that includes Blu-ray playback, but if If you examine this carefully you will see that it was added by someone and not made by the manufacturer. That's not a problem, I'm just clarifying a question I've been asked many times since this first review was published. Apple supports Blu-ray and you can verify this by just plugging this drive into Mac, popping in a BD-R or BD-RW and you can burn files just like DVD-R or DVD-RW, someone has to pay Sony a hefty license fee So far, no manufacturer including microsoft, didn't pay the fee, so they can't embed movie playback support for movie blu-ray disc.after trying some apps, i finally decided f For Mac Player Blu-ray Maker works well, has great picture quality and is updated frequently. yes you have to pay for it There is no free lunch. Free players no longer work or no longer support Blu-ray playback. This includes VLC, which has built-in support for Blu-ray playback but doesn't come with decryption keys, so it can't play commercial Blu-ray movies because they haven't paid a license fee. A few smart people found a way to get a set of keys in VLC and it worked for a couple of months but they stopped updating a couple of years ago so no movie made in the last few years has those keys up VLC can run. .The Blu-ray player can play many different video formats, so I think it is a must-have if you are serious about playing Blu-ray on Mac. There are commercial Windows programs out there with mixed results, so you need to test them thoroughly before spending any money on them. Multi-Region Support: Like most (actually all I know of) modern Blu-ray players. , this one seems to be region locked. If you have discs that you want to play from different regions with different region codes (i.e. different countries) then this unit, like most others, will not work for you and please note that the description of this product does not state multi-region support is promised. I added this to my review because I've received questions about it and people seem to understand that this is a legal issue and not a limitation of any particular piece of hardware. If you need support in multiple regions I suggest you look up these criteria and ask your provider to make sure you're getting what you want, it's not what's offered here. I use this drive to watch Blu-ray movies and burn Blu-ray data discs almost every day, and still enjoy the highly reliable performance, rugged and portable design, and reasonable cost. I have recommended this device to my family and friends.[.]

Pros
  • Comfortable
Cons
  • Definitely a bad product