You did it: Donut Hole 2!

Should we relocate here?

Feel free to go right ahead. There was a bit of trouble with people rating everything down but that seems to have abated.

I'd call that affordable, although right now I also don't have money to buy the burner, but when I finish my coursework later this month, I should be able to afford one pretty soon. Hopefully my new laptop will have an appropriate burner.

Now, if only I could actually play Blurays outside of Win/OSX. Stupid MPAA, or maybe its me for thinking that just because I've paid for a movie that I ought to be able to actually watch it on my computer.

Wow, you really can't play these discs in other OSes? That's ridiculous.

What about people who don't even live in the USA? The MPAA doesn't have power in those regions...

Not the encrypted ones, and I don't think that there's a licensed implementation outside of Win/OSX, the entire process from disc to monitor is supposed to be encrypted, and if you're not using approved hardware they degrade the signal.

Which is a shame because Bluray is really nice, but crap like this makes me hate America.

If it just degardes the movies you burn to BluRay discs I wonder if games and pictures/other files are not affected when copied to such discs and viewed/used on other OSs.

If you burn them you're fine, assuming that you've stripped the DRM or are burning your own movies. The problem is that if you've got a Blu ray movie in the computer degrades all the outputs for your computer. Meaning that your sound quality goes to crap and the resolution gets reduced so that you don't get the quality you paid for.

I'm not sure if they've fixed that, but it was quite a problem when Vista was new and there were some related glitches where having blu ray gear would cause other media to get distorted.

General data is not affected, only the standard blu-ray movie formats, and even then probably only commercial/encrypted/DRM'd stuff.

This is what I was wondering about......as if I used them i'd do so mainly for general data. They seem like good non-whole HDD data backup. (They go up to0 50GB right?)

For that sort of thing you're not going to have any trouble. Beyond the typical ones associated with optical media. And I'm mainly interested in them for back up myself. I use DVDs from time to time, but I'd like to have a Write Once Read Many copy of things in case I fat finger it and will have at least one local copy.

Plus for bare metal restores, a bluray disc can do an entire generic installation with ease.

Thanks, but again......Blurays go up to 50GB right? Or are there bigger ones now?

Dual layers are 50 GB, yes. I don't think three- or four-layer discs and accompanying burners have been manufactured for the general public yet. At least not as far as I've seen.

I just wish the 1TB prototype optical media would be put into the mainstream. 1 disc whole HDD backups would be nice.

Well it's a brand new day........how is everyone this morning? Wanna ask me anything or tell me about your day? We have lots of free foodstuffs available this morning and plenty of room on the couch.

Are you trying to rig an election?