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Connecting a HD DVD player to PC.

roky1970

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Is it possible to connect an external HD DVD player to my PC? My guess would be that the only way to do it is through a HDMI to USB cable. If those even exsist. Trying to find a HD Drive for your computer is extremly hard. Anyone have any suggestions or ideas about hooking up a seperate HD DVD player to a PC? Thank you.
 
Eh?? Get an Xbox 360 HD DVD drive. It's USB and plugs right in. That's what most of us are using. Beyond that, there are several new drives out there that read both Blu-ray and HD DVD's and write to DVD's for under 300 USD. A stand alone player is going to be completely useless for a PC, however.
 
I guess thats what I will have to do. I thought that AnyDVD HD only works with DVD drives. How does it work when a drive is connected through a USB port?
 
An HD DVD drive also reads DVD's. Anyway, it works flawlessly. I just built a new HTPC last week and it plays the discs perfectly. The Xbox 360 plays the discs back over the USB port, as well, and has zero problems with it. AnyDVD HD just sees it as any other drive. On my laptop, my LG GSA drive is connected via USB for DVD ripping/burning and AnyDVD has no problems with that, either. In short, it's a great way to add HD DVD capabilities to your machine.
 
Eh?? Get an Xbox 360 HD DVD drive. It's USB and plugs right in. That's what most of us are using.

isn't that incredibly slow? i mean how long does it take to rip a 15gb hd-dvd over usb2?

isn't there a way you can connect it via sata - i thought that's how people are chipping their xbox360's, so can you not use it that way to rip too?

other than that i've, this is about the only pc drive i've seen: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CD-000-TS (67ukp converts to about 140usd for you yankies :D ) although this is 2.4x, not sure how fast the xbox360 one is, and a 5x dvd burner (why you'd use this to burn dvd's i don't know!)
 
Takes about 100 minutes or so. Yea, it's slow, but, whatever. Just run it overnight. It works. I advocate this drive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136133

I'll probably get one at some point. Out of stock at the moment, but, that's a decent price given what it does.

In any case, if you can get an internal drive, that's certainly a better option. The good thing about the USB Xbox 360 drive is that you can move it from one machine to another rather easily.
 
isn't that incredibly slow? i mean how long does it take to rip a 15gb hd-dvd over usb2?

isn't there a way you can connect it via sata - i thought that's how people are chipping their xbox360's, so can you not use it that way to rip too?

USB 2 (480mb/s) is faster than SATA 1 (150mb/s) or SATA 2 (300mb/s)
The Hard drives are a lot slower than USB 2 will allow.
 
USB 2 (480mb/s) is faster than SATA 1 (150mb/s) or SATA 2 (300mb/s)
The Hard drives are a lot slower than USB 2 will allow.

that's bull i'm afraid, you've been taken in by the marketing department. next you'll be telling us usb2 is faster than firewire :disagree:
 
I have to agree with sej on this one. I'm a huge advocate of firewire. My coworkers often make fun of me for it, especially now that firewire is all but dead. However, firewire is WAY faster than USB2 even though it's "only" 400mbps. USB2's *theoretical* output is 480mbps but that is max throughput and hardly sustainable. Now, when we get to USB3 then we can talk. :) SATA is MUCH more consistent with their speed than USB is and will therefore give a real world advantage over USB in sustained data transfers. Nonetheless, back to the original topic, I maintain that the USB HD DVD drive gives enough performance to make it useful. You can certainly play movies back with no problems. As far as ripping goes, I don't have a comparison to draw from. Meaning that a SATA drive could very well be much faster than the USB drive....or it may not. I simply don't know.
 
I don't understand what the problem is with getting more internal HD DVD drives out on the market. Even if they don't burn, who cares right now. It is easy to find a Blu Ray internal drive, but HD is a whole different story. I have noticed that HP is offering a Bluray/HD combo drive on their elite desktops. It is only $250 to upgrade to this drive. I tried contacting them to purchase drive seperately, but they said no. Oh well.
 
I have to agree with sej on this one. I'm a huge advocate of firewire. My coworkers often make fun of me for it, especially now that firewire is all but dead. However, firewire is WAY faster than USB2 even though it's "only" 400mbps. USB2's *theoretical* output is 480mbps but that is max throughput and hardly sustainable. Now, when we get to USB3 then we can talk. :) SATA is MUCH more consistent with their speed than USB is and will therefore give a real world advantage over USB in sustained data transfers. Nonetheless, back to the original topic, I maintain that the USB HD DVD drive gives enough performance to make it useful. You can certainly play movies back with no problems. As far as ripping goes, I don't have a comparison to draw from. Meaning that a SATA drive could very well be much faster than the USB drive....or it may not. I simply don't know.

I have a USB 2 mybook 500GB Hard Drive
I have many Samsung and WD 500GB internal SATA 2 hard drives

ripping to either takes exactly the same time

PS
I was under the impression that SATA 2 could only sustain a burst transfer speed of 300 mb/s and mostly operated at a much slower speed.
I know nothing about firewire speeds!
 
I have a USB 2 mybook 500GB Hard Drive
I have many Samsung and WD 500GB internal SATA 2 hard drives

ripping to either takes exactly the same time

PS
I was under the impression that SATA 2 could only sustain a burst transfer speed of 300 mb/s and mostly operated at a much slower speed.
I know nothing about firewire speeds!

I've found that my SATA drive sustains a very high speed whereas USB tends to get bogged down if you have too many devices on the bus. Now in my new HTPC I have nothing but the mouse/kb and the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive on the USB bus, so, it does fairly well. I have a western digital external hard drive for my laptop that does both USB and firewire and I can tell you there's a *HUGE* difference in sustainable speeds between the two buses. Firewire is way more consistent with higher transfer rates. USB is all over the place. It does ok and works fine, but, firewire's definitely faster. Note that I'm not saying USB is bad, but, I do agree that for sustainable transfers it was never the best option and still isn't. USB3 should prove to change things dramatically on this front. I can't wait to see how well it works. SATA does very well at sustaining high transfer rates under a heavy load, at least in the situations I've run in to. Nevertheless, USB is fast enough to rip HD DVD's. It's just that with so much data, it's going to take a while no matter what you use.
 
I have a USB 2 mybook 500GB Hard Drive
I have many Samsung and WD 500GB internal SATA 2 hard drives

ripping to either takes exactly the same time

PS
I was under the impression that SATA 2 could only sustain a burst transfer speed of 300 mb/s and mostly operated at a much slower speed.
I know nothing about firewire speeds!

the hard disk you write to is largely irrelevant, i was talking about usb2 vs. sata for reading from the hd-dvd drive.

the sata2 interface is 3gbps, but even the fastest sata2 drives can only sustain just over 100mbps (wd-raptorx and seagate 7200.11) with your average drive only managing about 70mbps (wd-aaks and seagate 7200.10).

the usb2 vs. firewire thing is because firewire is asynchronous and usb isn't, i.e. usb2 is really only 240mbps in each direction, firewire is 400mbps read and write, plus usb2 uses the host cpu a lot, firewire is on-chip hardware.

firewire800 never really took off, a bit like esata i feel. usb3 should wipe the floor with everything - even fibre channel scsi, but again be hugely limited by disk speed.

anyway back on topic, it seems i was not right about the xbox360 hddvd drive being sata, it seems its atapi with a laptop-style ide connector and works on xp and macs with suitable adaptors and drivers.
 
I have a western digital external hard drive for my laptop that does both USB and firewire and I can tell you there's a *HUGE* difference in sustainable speeds between the two buses.

If you have Vista on your lappy, the speed difference may be due to Vista not working with the USB chip correctly. There is a bug in Vista that affects about 20% of laptops (I think it is the samsung chip that has the problem)
 
If you have Vista on your lappy, the speed difference may be due to Vista not working with the USB chip correctly. There is a bug in Vista that affects about 20% of laptops (I think it is the samsung chip that has the problem)

its a well known fact that firewire is faster than usb2, just give it up :agree:
 
If you have Vista on your lappy, the speed difference may be due to Vista not working with the USB chip correctly. There is a bug in Vista that affects about 20% of laptops (I think it is the samsung chip that has the problem)

This happens equally on XP SP2 Pro and Vista Ultimate. The speed difference was quite dramatic. I can play games off my external drive using Firewire and it's as fast as my internal 7200rpm ide drive. On USB, it's still fast but inconsistent as the rate would drop and then go back up. Again, this is on XP or Vista...made no difference.
 
Well I can't speak for the HD DVD drive on USB, but I have a Blu-ray writer and it makes no difference on the ripping speed whether it's connected internally via SATA or in an external box and coming through USB 2. What I did find under XP is that it seemed to be something to do with the size of the file it was ripping. On earlier versions of AnydvdHD I found that if I tried to rip 2 Blu-ray discs in a row or the disc had 2 big files on it the second file would take 2 to 3 times longer than the first one. But if I rebooted the system and then ripped the second one it was just as quick as the first. I've found that it doesn't seem to make any difference what it's connected to it still will take over an hour to rip either an HD DVD or Blu-ray disc.
The raw data transfer for HD DVD is around 36.5 mbits at 1 speed read, the same as Blu-ray (people may think Blu-ray is around 54 but thats because it runs a 1.5 speed) so the actual read rate from both discs is way below what either firewire SATA or USB2 can handle and therefore all 3 connection types can easily handle the data rates available even if your player can handle reading the disc at 6 speed
 
Well I can't speak for the HD DVD drive on USB, but I have a Blu-ray writer and it makes no difference on the ripping speed whether it's connected internally via SATA or in an external box and coming through USB 2.

ah that's the info i was looking for, although it surprises me - maybe its limited by the speed of the optics and not the transfer speed.

The raw data transfer for HD DVD is around 36.5 mbits at 1 speed read, the same as Blu-ray (people may think Blu-ray is around 54 but thats because it runs a 1.5 speed) so the actual read rate from both discs is way below what either firewire SATA or USB2 can handle and therefore all 3 connection types can easily handle the data rates available even if your player can handle reading the disc at 6 speed

dunno what the xbox360 drive goes at but i've seen adverts for 2.4x hddvd drives, so i guess that's about 88mbps, which is faster than your average sata1 drive will handle and approaching the limit of the fastest sata2 drives available (in realworld numbers, not the 3gbps rubbish that the marketing folk spout).

in practice usb2 would be really hard pushed to do 36mbps, firewire will manage it but not much more.
 
There is some confusion in terminology here, of the BYTE vs. BIT type.

The HD/BD read speeds are in the 30-50Mbps (Mega bits per second).
The USB/FW bandwidth is in the 30-50MBps (Mega bytes per second).
http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html

Diogen.

ah that seems more realistic - hddvd at 36.5Mbps equates to 36.5/8x2.4 = 11 megabytes per second for a 2.4x drive, so pretty slow - which would explain why connecting via usb2/sata makes no difference, as its way under both their rated speeds.

so 30gbx1024mb/11mbps/60secs = 46mins to rip a 30gb hddvd at peak speed on a 2.4x drive, so an hour including decrypting sounds about right.
 
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