I am interested in attaching an external blu-ray reader or writer to my MediaSmart Ex 487 so that I can copy blu-rays and dvd's to my MSS directly using My Movies Disc Copier. If any one has done this, I would be interested in knowing if there are any issues I should take into consideration before buying an external blu-ray reader/writer (i.e., will any external blu-ray reader or writer work) and if anyone has any recommendations on external blu-ray readers or writers to use for this purpose. I have searched for a thread expressly on this issue, but I didn't find any directly on point. Thanks.

Hi clarkdv,

I happen to have an external USB Connected Blu-Ray Drive I pieced together to connect to an Acer Aspire Revo that works extremely well. I have never ripped BLU-RAYs or DVDs directly to my server I have always prefered to do it with one of my client computers and I use makeMKV to do all my ripping which I am quite happy with.

I would recommend you get an internal Blu-Ray drive and just install it in another computer but there is a catch 22 with them in that to use them to play discs you really need a fairly powerful processor and good graphics card and software to play the movies. Now the last desktop I installed the drive into would rip the Blu-Rays just fine but would crash when attempting to play the movies but I did have a recommended graphics card to play the movies but the processor was the weak link. Having said all that I was still able to rip the Blu-Rays from that drive which was installed in a desktop without issue.

Now the weird part as you know is the Intel Atom is not the most powerful processor but the REVO has the NVidia ION Graphics which really make its work. So I pulled the drive out of the desktop and pulled out an old IDE External Enclosure, I had a USB-SATA cable I used to make the connection and used the power supply in the enclosure to power the device and works like a charm. So I recycled some old stuff to make newer stuff work but this was only to test the REVO out to see if it would indeed play BLU-Rays and today the Revo sits on top of the external Blu-Ray drive.

I do have multiple servers I could test this drive on but I have always done what Damian has done in that I rip from a client computer then after I verify the movie I movie to the the server. I have 2 servers with DVD Drives and I never use them for ripping because I want all my servers to be free to do their intened tasks.

I know this doesn't answer your question fully and others I am certain will chim in with their opinions but after your post sitting here for over 24 hours I decided to reply to it.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Thanks for the information Comp1962.