DVDFab Passkey is Free till the end of the month!

Baggie_Saiyan said:
IncendiaryLemon said:
Looking at eBay there are some external ones for about the £25 mark but they are unbranded. Not sure I'd trust them.
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I bought one last July for around that haven't had any problems at all reads and plays BD's just fine.
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Huh. It might be worth a shot then. I assume that the particular one you bought is no longer available but is it just something like this?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/External-USB- ... 463e7ace63

I'm just a little skeptical seeing as they use USB 2.0 which I assumed wouldn't be fast enough to read BR discs.
 
IncendiaryLemon said:
Baggie_Saiyan said:
IncendiaryLemon said:
Looking at eBay there are some external ones for about the £25 mark but they are unbranded. Not sure I'd trust them.
Click to expand...
I bought one last July for around that haven't had any problems at all reads and plays BD's just fine.
Click to expand...

Huh. It might be worth a shot then. I assume that the particular one you bought is no longer available but is it just something like this?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/External-USB- ... 463e7ace63

I'm just a little skeptical seeing as they use USB 2.0 which I assumed wouldn't be fast enough to read BR discs.
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I have a USB 2.0 BD-RW drive, it works perfectly fine. I just don't like playing back directly from disc...
 
IncendiaryLemon said:
I think I might take a stab at one of these then. Also, quick question, does DVDFab get around Sentai's GeoLocking?
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AnyDVD doesn't if that's of any help. You can play back the files individually, but purely from trying out it with Kodi, trying to play the disc "normally" (like a BD player would) results in the lockout screen.
 
Ah right, that's a shame. Oh well. I mostly wanted to know because if I bought a BR drive I'd have no Region A discs to try on it to see if DVDPass works correctly :p The closest I have is my Kinmoza blu ray which is GeoLocked.
 
I'd assume changing your system locale to USA would be the workaround for that? Haven't tested it personally, but if it solely checks you Location and/or formats then it should work.
 
Buzz201 said:
My optical drive is a Samsung drive from the UK.

But as Incendiary Lemon said, I think you select it when you first buy. (Although I think the block is software based, and there are tools that help you fiddle with the software to allow more region changes.)

I normally rip the contents to a hard drive and play back from the hard drive, as playing back from the disc uses too much CPU for my liking.
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Ah. Thanks for the info. I'll be sure to get an optical drive soon, then.

Tried it out with DVDs and it worked well.
 
IncendiaryLemon said:
I think I might take a stab at one of these then. Also, quick question, does DVDFab get around Sentai's GeoLocking?
Click to expand...
Geolocking? I've never heard of this, are there other companies that do the same trick? (I don't have anything from Sentai, but I have a few weird North American discs that might.)
 
Sentai is the only Anime company that does this to my knowledge, it's weird. It's actually good for us because PS3s and PS4s are all set to the US Setting (or something like that, I'm not so sure on the technicalities) even though they're Region A blu rays so despite the fact that PS3s and PS4s in the UK are set to Region B, these Geolocked releases still work.
 
Do you know of any non-anime companies that do it? I am/was until I became broke a blu-ray enthusiast, so I have some weird American blu-rays that might have been locked in a similar way.
 
Just a brief word on unbranded products on Ebay:

Beware.

Especially if the country of origin is China. I've known a lot of people who opted for those goods on the basis of low asking prices, who had nothing but trouble from the items they received. At this point, I trust BD drives from overseas about as much as I trust laptop batteries. (And yes, the horror stories you hear about those exploding are well founded!)
 
Well they all ships from the UK so they'd be easy enough to return and get a refund if the worst was to happen. I'm pretty sure the one I was looking at had a 14 day return guarantee.
 
HdE said:
Just a brief word on unbranded products on Ebay:

Beware.

Especially if the country of origin is China. I've known a lot of people who opted for those goods on the basis of low asking prices, who had nothing but trouble from the items they received. At this point, I trust BD drives from overseas about as much as I trust laptop batteries. (And yes, the horror stories you hear about those exploding are well founded!)
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Eh, I can't speak for batteries but I've found that a hell of a lot of unbranded or no-name Chinese goods you can get online are basically the exact same product sold in the UK, just here they have a brand name slapped on and the price inflated by 200%-300%.

I just compare them to branded goods and if they look exactly the same, chances are they are the same. They're probably made in the exact same factories.
 
ayase said:
Eh, I can't speak for batteries but I've found that a hell of a lot of unbranded or no-name Chinese goods you can get online are basically the exact same product sold in the UK, just here they have a brand name slapped on and the price inflated by 200%-300%.

I just compare them to branded goods and if they look exactly the same, chances are they are the same. They're probably made in the exact same factories.
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Sadly not always the case. It may work that way if the item you're looking for is nigh-on identical to a McSuperZippyTron branded product, but there's also a lot of VERY cheaply made tat in circulation that looks and feels a heck of a lot less impressive once you get it out of the box than it did online. I have a few acquaintances who have been caught out when buying item at the cheapest price possible - usually translating to a device that either doesn't work at all, works with issues, or enjiy a very short lifespan.

Like anything else, though, I think it's case that if you know what you're buying into, you can approach it with a little more peace of mind.
 
Just a bit of an update, as the drive I purchased turned out to be complete rubbish. It worked 2-3 times then it stopped registering on my PC and stopped working altogether. I'll be returning it to Amazon to get a refund, gonna go to the post office tomorrow. So, yeah, don't buy Coolead products, at least the external BD drives.
 
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