FastMac slips out three slimline USB Blu-ray drives, including a $99 reader
By Nilay Patel 
posted February 12th 2009 2:43AM
posted February 12th 2009 2:43AM
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$99 for a reader is not bad, if they are supported by the OS, then whats to stop some enteprising young whippersnapper from hacking this into a BDless mac?
also, the official apple MacBook Air superdrive costs around $100 doesnt it?
you can read data from it on a mac, but mac has no codec support for blu-ray movies so you won't be able to play them because apple has such a great excuse of it being a big bag of hurt. i'm guessing you can do so while running boot camp though
In august of 08. 17" Sony vaio laptop w/ blueray n 1080p hdmi.,$1050.insane picture quality!!!
This sucks, my laptop came with builtin blu ray, hdmi n 1080p anything less is so 2003. Get with the times people.
how much did you pay for that laptop in 2003?
he's still paying for it.
@Philosopher: OHHHHHHHHHHHH YES MASTER, you are the chosen one, can I lick your boots?
Why won't Apple just integrate Bluray into their notebooks?
It cost money... Apple is cheap. Just like flash on the Iphone. It will come when there is enough pression from customers.
Steve Jobs says "its a bag of hurt"
I don't think money is the problem, there are many other brand coming very late with blu-ray players.
Why doesn't Bose have one? i think for the same reason.
It's a bag of hurt.
-Steve Jobs
"although you'll need Windows to play BD movies"
wait.....(yes i did RTFA but its 3:07 so maybe i missed it). it's a blu-ray drive but if you're on a mac its not?
It'll read BD data disks, but won't playback commercial BD movies because Apple has not yet implemented the hardware DRM crap required for BD *movie* playback. Or at least that's afaik.
That could be useful for doing a whole backup on 2 or 3 disks, but not for this kind of money
Yeah, its total bullshit considering that apple is on the Blu-Ray association board and everything, and is one of its founding members. Meanwhile Microsoft, who was a HD-DVD backer managed to get Blu-Ray running on their system first. I don't think that they officially sanctioned it, but it seems easier for developers to add this sort of thing to Windows than it is to add to OSX
that's pretty sweet
so vlc on mac wont play a blu ray movie from this??
theres only one way to find out
hehe
Correct :'(
I have the Xbox360 HD-DVD addon, and it's the same situation. Plugs in, detects, shows me the disk etc, but there's no software available for movie playback.
PistolPeet:
"... but there's no software available for movie playback."
Yes there is.
It's called Windows, and Windows 7 even in its Beta stages does a remarkably beautiful job of playing it back.
I was looking for an external blu ray drive since the one in my laptop only works half the time. This one looks slick.
still under warranty?
Any chance that a Core Duo Mac Mini w/ XP will play a movie fine?
Doubt it, you'd need some sort of hardware acceleration, and I'm pretty sure those only came with the Intel GMA 950 which had no VC-1/AVC decoding abilities.
By all means, try it, but I'd be very surprised to see if it works smoothly without dropping frames. You'll need some Cyberlink (or equivalent) software to decode it, but it's an expensive gamble.
a dream-come-true for all the fanboys wishing to play for bluray movie playback..o wait..apple hasn't gotten out of the stone-age yet...down at cupertino i hear they still use 5.25 floppies to backup their atari 2600 rom collections...get ur head out of your ass apple and get with the mainstream...just because you cant have everything perfectly the way you like it doesn't mean that you shouldn't give it a shot for God sakes!
Apple expect we follow them, not the other way around.
How in the hell are we expected to follow Apple when they don't manufacture or even develop any of the hardware that goes into any of their devices/machines.
They come up with the designs, slap a logo on it, program the OS, but that's as far as it goes.
You can't expect people to follow your hardware lead when you don't have the capabilities, expertise, know-how, or framework to even make it happen.
IBM can lead in that respect.
Intel can.
Nvidia can.
Logitech can.
AMD can.
...to name a few.
Oh, you lucky young thing.... you don't remember the days when PCs didn't have such basics as PnP (juggle your IRQs), Firewire (before usb2) or even integrated audio (of any kind). Apple did.
Of course, I was a gamer, so I used PCs, then I was a CAD jockey, ditto. You seem to be a PC head yourself, so why are you so upset that you can't watch Blu-ray on a Mac? It is a shame though, Mac Mini is just lovely as a media playing machine.
Looks good. But what about power supply? Will it need an additional usb-cable (y-cable) or even a power adapter? Anyone got any info on that?
I just got mine, there is a power adapter, but it also comes with a USB cable that gives it power.... In other words, there are two USB cables that plug into the computer, one for data, and one for power.
So Roxio's Mac Blu-ray plugin for Toast they sell for $20 does not allow blu-ray playback on a mac?
i'm pretty sure that's just to burn br, not play back, and anything you burn would be stripped of drm already
Yep, it's for burning and reading BD only, not playing back movies, no codec to support them, DRM! Arrrghhhhh!
I just hope this drive is better than their crappy batteries! After taking 3 weeks to ship me one, I got a MacBook battery from them, I could not run it for more than a few min and my mac would just power off as if I had yanked the battery out. Returned for replacement and the replacement would never fully charge. Returning that one today. I have asked them for a full refund and they refuse me. All I can get is another crappy replacement battery.
Personally I would not recommend buying anything from FastMac.
- K
P.S. - I am not the only one: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/0/314/RipOff0314643.htm
I put a Blu-Ray drive in my new computer, and I don't think it was worth it.
The hardware is great, it's the PowerDVD software that is flaky as hell.
This is a nice cheap way to get a read only drive to do some rips.
Barring any flakiness of performance (per Kiteless's remark), this is a great solution for netbooks (even though it's from a Mac oriented website). I've been looking for an external drive for my netbook, and it has been rather depressing knowing that an external slim DVD burning drive will set me back about $70 to $100. If I can get Blue-Ray as well, that's a HUGE bonus for me (even though I will probably never use it with the netbook).
It does make me pause a bit though... where does FastMac make their money on the low-end drive? "Rip-off" alarms are going off...
xbox 360 add-on please
Just ordered this. Perfect compliment to my BD-less new Gateway FX lappy. :)
I just received mine and it seems to work good, It comes with a pirated copy of Cyberlink PowerDVD, so be aware of that.