M6600 Owners Thread

If you check amd site, the driver is different for each mfr. Not sure about nvida though

 

nVidia has a generic driver available, a bit like what you get from them and AMD for the radeon and geforce GPUs.

 

Can somebody suggest me an internal 9.5mm Bluray Burner for my m6600? I ordered an LG BT20N from Amazon US through a friend of mine thinking that it would fit the bill but it turned out to be a 12.7mm trayload drive. Just going through the process of upgrading my system. I live in Asia and returning the thing seems to be a hassle now. What to do?

 

Take a look at these Panasonic/Mata$hita 9.5mm tall drives:
UJ262
UJ232
UJ152

Scott-

 

I think I will give back to the forum a little I had this in my watch list for a month, and the seller just marked them down 50%. I picked one up today, I will let everyone know how it works. There are only 2 left, so get while the gettings good! Don't be greedy and buy both and resell one

UJ-242A 9.5mm Blu-Ray Burner $49.99
Original Dell UJ242 UJ-242A Blu-Ray burner writer recorder player BD-ROM BD-R RE | eBay

I may order a $3 bezel incase the one on the drive doesn't fit.

The new model Dell is using is the UJ-252. So these are last years model i'm guessing.

 

Thanks Scott. UJ262 is a fairly expensive drive. There is a UJ232A at Amazon but it doesn't have any reviews. I am not sure if can handle all the newest media types or not and it still touches $160. I wish there was a way of shaving some mm's off this new 12.7mm drive

I am also giving the other option a thought. I can get a good external BD Burner and can use an additional HDD instead of the internal optical drive. Doesn't look that neat to me but still it's a good option. Any suggestions for a good external bluray burner under $100? What about if I use this same LG drive in a container and connect via a USB/SATA cable? But it would be a lot of parts to carry!

Also where can I find an additional suitable caddy/container for the other HDD to fit into the optical bay?

Thanks.

 

The UJ242 mentioned above is a good plug-n-play drive at a great price. I use a 12.7mm tall external blu-ray drive, which gives me 2 drives to play with. I was able to get the newer Sony Optiarc BD-5750H-01 6X SATA Slim Blu-ray Writer for $75 here: Sony Optiarc BD-5750H-01 6X SATA Slim Blu-ray Writer | eBay

The slim drive caddies are cheap and something like this will work: USB SATA External Slim Caddy Case for Laptop CD/DVD-ROM | eBay

There is no need for anything faster than USB-2.0 since optical drives still operate below 240Mb/s.

Scott

 

Was going to suggest that. Isn't carrying around a lot of BR disks kind of a hassle too? And if you forget to pack the one you need . . . SOL.

Presuming that copying BR files to HDD works just like anything else.

Addendum: I thought I saw a post around the last month where someone got it too look flawless.

 

BD rips take a lot of HDD space (well uncompressed) and you will need a specialized program to rip your blu-rays. The length the movie industry does to to prevent you from making a legitimate copy of content you purchased and have a right to backup for your own use is just ridiculous. It's also to "prevent piracy" (i wont' get into details on that), but let's just say that in the end it causes headaches for the consumer that just wants to make fair use of something he purchased.

Here's what i would personally do: rip the blu-ray, compress it down to a more manageable size, you got a M6600, might as well use it to encode the video to .mp4 or .mkv and then store it on the drive.

 

I was messing with this just last week so I figured I would make a post with some specific apps just in case anyone is interested.

AnyDVD HD makes ripping the disc (uncompressed) pretty simple. Right-click the icon in the system tray and select "Rip to image" — it will create an (unprotected) ISO image of the movie that you can mount with whatever tool you like and then play in your favorite BD player. AnyDVD HD is sort of pricey, though, and at almost 50 GB per disc, you can't carry too many images around with you.

Messing with the video content itself is not bad either once you have an unprotected rip. There are a bunch of M2TS files on the disc. MKVToolNix (the free MKV muxer) will take them and allow you to select which tracks you want and then mux to an MKV file. You can save some space by just taking the main video and audio track of the main feature (~20 GB or so for a two-hour film?) and saving it as a MKV file, still uncompressed so you have the full BD quality. The movie I was messing with was actually split into multiple files on the disc, MKVToolNix was happy to append them into a single MKV file as well, and furthermore I was able to preserve the subtitle track.

To save more space you'll need to compress it using something like HandBrake.