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MartyMcNuts wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 1:03 am Direct UHD disc playback is not recommended for any drive as you will wear out your drive a lot faster.

Because support ended long ago for my lovely Pioneer LX500 BD player I bought a second one to share DVD/BD movie playing, thereby extending their lives. But to do so further, can I USB connect an external BD drive and have DVD/BD movie playback functionality via JRiver, VLC or some other app loaded on the TV? My TV is a Sony A80L.Note that I likely won't be buying anymore than the one UHD disc I have, so we're talking strictly about commercially pressed DVD and BD movie playback.

zoom+slomo wrote: Thu Oct 30, 2025 11:39 am

MartyMcNuts wrote: Wed Jan 22, 2025 1:03 am Direct UHD disc playback is not recommended for any drive as you will wear out your drive a lot faster.

Because support ended long ago for my lovely Pioneer LX500 BD player I bought a second one to share DVD/BD movie playing, thereby extending their lives. But to do so further, can I USB connect an external BD drive and have DVD/BD movie playback functionality via JRiver, VLC or some other app loaded on the TV? My TV is a Sony A80L.Note that I likely won't be buying anymore than the one UHD disc I have, so we're talking strictly about commercially pressed DVD and BD movie playback.

Doubt it. Pretty sure PC optical drives require a PC.

You can actually use android devices (Android phones, Android/Google TV) with BD/DVD/CD drives. As far as I can tell, there are two methods that I have discovered.

1st Method: MLUSB Mounter - File Manager || Play Store || Should be compatible with any drives
You have to download this file manager and you can now access pretty much any disc drives from all manufacturers. There are, however, some downsides to this app. You have to purchase the extension(s) inside the app itself to even access your BD/DVD/VCD discs.

Here are 2 screenshots of the extensions
https://mega.nz/file/N9ZiRRqZ#vE202Pytt ... vBwnVorKf0
https://mega.nz/file/NoQzzIyB#BP2g8V6C6 ... ZPv3oFG2aM

The important ones are UDF/ISO mount, ISO 9660/UDF write, and maybe Blu-ray Authoring.
I've tested it with BD-ROM movies, DVD-ROM movies, BD-R, DVD-R, Audio CD, and Video CD with my Pioneer S11 and a Matshita/Panasonic DVD Ram uj8c0 It can access all the listed disc types except Audio CD for whatever reason. So you will not be listening or ripping any Audio CDs but you can for some weird reason access and watch VCDs with no problems. The app allows you access the rest with the usual downside of not having the ability to watch DRM protected movies (Not its fault since I don't think there are any apps on Android that can bypass DRM discs other than the 2nd method). I successfully copied files from DVD-R, VCD and BD-R, but I have yet to try it with BD/DVD-ROMS, it should work though. Heck the app even allows you to write BDMV files onto your BD-R discs.


2nd Method: Hitachi-LG Data Storage suite of apps. || ONLY WORKS with specific HItachi/LG DRIVES
Link to the suite of apps: https://play.google.com/store/apps/deve ... Inc.&hl=en

I unfortunately cannot test any of the apps as I don't own any compatible Hitachi/LG drives. There are however reviews on YouTube you can find. Here's the link to a written review: https://xdaforums.com/t/android-friendl ... w.4469265/ The review is slightly outdated, but I couldn't to find more recent reviews. The one benefit of this method is that you can watch DRM protected DVDs with the TrueDVD apps.

These are the methods I discovered while scouring the internet. Do tell if there are any more methods.

JustAnotherUser wrote: Sat Nov 01, 2025 5:47 am The app allows you access the rest with the usual downside of not having the ability to watch DRM protected movies (Not its fault since I don't think there are any apps on Android that can bypass DRM discs other than the 2nd method). I successfully copied files from DVD-R, VCD and BD-R, but I have yet to try it with BD/DVD-ROMS, it should work though. Heck the app even allows you to write BDMV files onto your BD-R discs.

Thanks for the effort to help but since there's no way that the Android OS on my Sony TV could recognize,much less use, makeMKV to thereby decrypt my BD movies there's little point in going further. But I was told here that just using a BD drive with a pc to play DVDs and BDs will shorten its life. If so, by how much? For example, say if I use it to watch seven one hour TV episodes a week, how long before the drive will likely die?

zoom+slomo wrote: Sat Nov 01, 2025 10:45 am Thanks for the effort to help but since there's no way that the Android OS on my Sony TV could recognize,much less use, makeMKV to thereby decrypt my BD movies there's little point in going further. But I was told here that just using a BD drive with a pc to play DVDs and BDs will shorten its life. If so, by how much? For example, say if I use it to watch seven one hour TV episodes a week, how long before the drive will likely die?

I don't think you can know in advance how long a drive will last. I think of it this way… my optical drives can only read so many discs before something fails irrevocably. I can't know what the number is, but it is surely a finite number. I can spend my allotment of reads in any way I choose.

Around here the general philosophy is spending a read to create a rip of the data on the disc is a worthwhile thing to do. With a single read, I can watch the rip many times. Spending one of my optical drive's reads to watch a disc a single time is considered a relatively poor way to spend an optical drive's allotment of reads since 1 read only results in 1 watch.

I appreciated that DVD & BD ripping is largely what makes makemkv relevant, though I purchased the app out thanks last year when someone at avforum.com explained how to use it to allow BD movie playback on VLC and JRiver players. But the idea of paying someone or diying a massive server to store even half of my huge DVD/BD movie and TV collection-and spending time I really don't have to rip them-just won't work for me. I store my disc collection in a climate controlled room, and so far I've luckily incurred no data loss. I'll just buy three external BD drives, test them before I keep them and hope they last as long as possible. This is a nice option too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vqOIV6s1g8

You're not the only one! I also weighed up the cost of large hard drives vs buying optical drives and decided that given the performance I would rather get the extra optical drives and carry on watching discs directly. Most of my discs I will probably watch only a few times so to use all that disc space up didn't seem an efficient use of time or disc space when I have a library over 1000 strong. I have been watching discs directly on various HTPCs since 2005 so I guess it's also partly a matter of habit, and I have had so many HDDs fail on me that I don't trust them as a long term storage medium without tons of backups, which would quadruple the cost.