When looking for the best PC DVD player the first rule is get one that does everything, this will ensure that you don’t need to purchase a single Blu ray or faster DVD writer in the near future.
We still see quite a few desktop or tower computers around today that in effect come with 2 DVD’s drives, this is generally down to the manufacturer using older cheaper drives, admittedly one may be a Blu-Ray player, but why not get a single drive that does everything.
I’ve even seen laptops that have a CD writer built in and an external DVD writer, did you know most laptops follow two standards and the internet drive could easily be replaced by one that does everything.
When deciding which PC DVD player why not get all in one drive? It can read and write to CD’s, read and write to DVD’s and also play Blu ray disks.
When choosing which PC DVD player speed is of the essence, currently the fastest DVD writer around will write at around 22x this equates to around 1.5gbps although this may be reduced if you are using an older type computer, or DVD media that does not allow these kind of writing speeds.
Companies providing drives offering this type of performance include Lite-on, Samsung, LG, I’m sure there are many more, but these are companies I think offer the best PC DVD player as they are not only reliable but give consistently good performance.
The cost
A fast internet DVD drive can be bought for around £30, for laptops around £40-£50 if you shop around.
If you want a complete drive with Blu ray this will cost approximately 1.5 to 2 times the price, which is still great value as even dual speed drives used to cost around £200 not so many years ago.
Is it worth the cost?
Many people are disappointed by DVD driver performance, the same goes for Blu ray drives, you could buy the best PC DVD player in the world, but if the computer hardware is simply not fast enough to make most of it performance will be reduced, causes for this can include slow hard drive/data through put, using older USB ports, usually type 1 which is around 10 times slower than type 2, even not having enough system RAM can reduce performance as the system will need to use more hard drive space as virtual RAM.
If you have an older computer when deciding which PC DVD player sometimes the best may be a false economy.
Did you know closing applications and not using the computer while burning disks can help to increase its performance?
With Blu ray many people, myself included like to display the image from my computer to the TV, having a poor graphics card will lead to jumpy images especially if trying to watch higher resolutions such as 1080p/1080i, and a graphics card upgrade may be needed.
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