Question - Will UHD BD Readers Be Coing Out For PCs?

[Benedict_Arnold]

I have to ask as I've pretty much condemned my CD player purchasing to the same level as that of VHS players and gramophones - nice to have, a little luxury, not to be taken seriously.

I ripped my entire CD collection to FLACs and now play those back from a media PC, and I've almost finished ripping all my DVDs and 1080p Blu-Rays to hard disk MKV files as well. New BDs and CDs and even the odd DVD all now get ripped to hard disk as soon as the cellophane comes off then put away.

So....

Are we likely to see UHD readers and the software to rip them to hard disk any time soon?

That way I can rip my UHD BDs to hard disk and put them away too.

I currently using AnyDVD HD and MakeMKV to rip BDs and DVDs, dBPoweramp for CDs. I suppose I should ask the software vendors about their intentions, but I'm curious about hardware.

Please note I don't rip stuff to sell or distribute illegally, just for my convenience and to preserve / conserve the original hard media, just like when we used to copy our vinyl LPs onto cassettes.

 

[Samd]

I thought you could rip them now but no-one yet beaten the encryption so not much use! Sure I read somewhere that a couple of orgs which produce this software have said that they are not even going to try!

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

A regular BD ripped to MKV takes up around 30 gigabytes of hard disk, a DVD just three. Could it be simply that a UHD BD takes up so much hard disk that it isn't worth it?

 

[Feral]

You need a bdxl bluray drive to read the discs on a pc. Mine which was salvaged from my vaio is fine for BD but not for uhd blurays so when i get to ripping an upgrade is in order.

I use pavetube bytecopy and makemkv depending on the complexity of the disc. I believe pavetube already supports 4k rips. But cannot verify yet. As for space, storage is relatively cheap and given how fragile the discs are i would prefer to backup lossless and stream from nas.

 

[Feral]

I use nvidia shield for streaming duty with SPMC which has 4k hdr although not DV

 

[Benedict_Arnold]

You need a bdxl bluray drive to read the discs on a pc. Mine which was salvaged from my vaio is fine for BD but not for uhd blurays so when i get to ripping an upgrade is in order.

I use pavetube bytecopy and makemkv depending on the complexity of the disc. I believe pavetube already supports 4k rips. But cannot verify yet. As for space, storage is relatively cheap and given how fragile the discs are i would prefer to backup lossless and stream from nas.

All a bit moot for me as I haven't bought a 4K BDP or any 4K BDs yet, just curious.

I use a RAID10 array (striped and mirrored) to try to keep my ripped files safe. A 6TB "spinning rust" hard disk here costs about $250 for a decent brand you've actually heard of, and that will hold about 200 BDs. So four of those RAID'd costs 4 x $250 for the discs plus $150 for the enclosure = $1,150 for a 12 terabyte capacity RAID drive that'll hold 400, not 200, BDs. That works out at about $3 a BD to store them.

If, the size of 4K BD files were to grow by another factor of 10, like DVDs at 3 GB to BDs at 30 GB, means 4K BDs would take up 300 GB, meaning I'd only get 40 4K BDs in the same storage space, cost to store per disc about $30, or the same cost as the disc. So I'm not sure it's even worth it, especially as the last "little cherub" will be leaving the nest soon, so discs going walkies shouldn't be so much of a problem as it has been in the past.

Keep us posted though, File size will be the determining factor.

 

[Alsone]

http://www.whathifi.com/advice/ultra-hd-blu-ray-everything-you-need-to-know

It would appear that capacity of UHD Blu Ray is twice the size of conventional BD-XL dual layer discs. ie 100GB However, there are several different disc sizes in both formats making comparison difficult.

The best way to compare would be to analyse the size of the same film on Blu Ray and 4K UHD, although You're still dependant on the individual studios encoding so it would remain a guide only.

 

[Samd]

Following from another forum may help?

Well I finally got my copy of The Martian, UHD version from best buy, and loaded into my LG BH16NS40 BDXL drive (September 22, 2015 Build running Rom Ver:1.00 bought from Amazon US), and just like previously mentioned (with a WH16NS40 of recent build) the LG BDXL Drive read the UHD disc without problems. This UHD disc is unreadable in my other Blu-ray drives (Pioneer BDR208B and LG GGC-H20L). I have a MacPro and the Mac reports a used disc capacity as 52.54 GB with a total capacity of 69.54 GB (MacOs calculates GB differently), consistent with others conjecturing that this is a 66 GB double density disc. And just like reported the older firmware updates listed on the LG website for this drive do not work, with a Checksum error when I try to update the firmware. I have also tried to see if AnyDVD HD can read decode this drive using a Windows XP virtual machine, and as expected it error out as an unrecognizable format. I also have just set up a Samsung UBD-K8500 UHD player. But I have not tried to burn any BDXL discs and see if the Samsung player can read them.