Experienced AnyDVD/CloneDVD user here...just got a Blu-Ray player today and will be anxious to back-up the new soon-to-grow collection! I have a few questions about how to get started.
1) In terms of what drive to look for, currently my drive uses IDE connection but the only Blu-Ray burners I can find are either SATA or external USB. Obviously, the external is a lot more $$ but I'm not sure what would be involved with making myself SATA-compatible. What could I do here?
2) From the release notes of the upgrades, it seems AnyDVD is quite capable of reading BR, but would I still use CloneDVD for the burning? Or is there other software I would need to look into?
3) Media-wise....I know there's a wide gamut of low to high quality DVD-R/DVD+R out there, so is it the same story with the BR media? For example, would the RIDATA for sale on Newegg be a good starter set?
Thanks so much in advance for your help, and if this is already posted somewhere I apologize for the duplicate posting.
1) Check and see if your motherboard has sata ports (usually little red squares), your current drive may well be IDE but you can just use sata instead
2) No, clonedvd will not burn blurays, the main hindrance will be shrinking the movie which will beg the question why go BluRay if you're just gonna shrink it anyway. Once you've shrunk the movie you can use imgburn or nero
3) Can't help ya there, i just back up all my blurays onto a harddrive and stream those mofos
media wise
frys electronics usually had asale 15disc spindle for 64.99
riadata also good i have no problems with it so far
but let me suggest u one thing
get 15pack spindle if u have ur collection i bet half of ur collection will be under 25gb(no ripping or eliminating) . use bd-discs to backup
some of them are over 25gb for those use harddrive
Initally u r spending abit of money .Trust u will end up doing this anyway
compressing to dvd-r and dvd-dl isn't worth it atleast in my point of view
Regarding KidKappa's answer, I might be missing something but why would I need to shrink anything if I'm using BR media? (Maybe if it is a > 25 GB disk and I want it to fit on a 25 GB BR media?)
I checked and my computer does NOT have the SATA connections...does that mean external is my only option? or what would be involved with adding SATA (if that's even possible)
Finally, if CloneDVD does not work, do I need to use that complicated sequence of programs I've seen in some other threads or is there a more streamlined version out there? :)
The SATA ports are internal but can be adapted to the outside. Have you investigated your system specs or looked on the motherboard. I would think you must have sata ports or your system won't likely have the horsepower. Maybe you don't have a spare one though.
