Notebooks Without Optical Drives...

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thefewtheproud

Gawd
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Oct 23, 2006
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So I'm diggin the high performance ultraportable notebooks that are out like the u260 and the samsung series 9 but the problem with these for me is the lack of an optical drive. With something so small and portable I would love to pop in a movie on a flight or road trip and an external optical drive seems like it would be annoying. Anyone who is using or has used one of these types of notebooks let me know your thoughts. I've always steered clear of notebooks that lacked an optical drive.
 
Owner of a HP tm2t here. Ever since I got this machine there hasn't been one moment when I felt remorse for the lack of a built-in optical drive. Notebook hard drives are so massive these days there aren't that many good reasons to have an optical drive physically attached at all times (mine is 500GB, but I think the second generation tm2s come with a 640GB drive now). Prior to travel, music can be ripped to MP3s/FLAC, movies can be backed up to ISOs or mkvs, and games that aren't bought via DD are backed up using CloneCD or Alcohol 120%.

Now I do have an external USB optical drive that I use sparingly, though I would definitely recommend investing in one for initial software setup and ripping whatever you plan on taking with you.
 
M11x from alienware love mine! Have all my digital copy movies in itunes and netflix when on wireless.
 
GushpinBob said:
Owner of a HP tm2t here. Ever since I got this machine there hasn't been one moment when I felt remorse for the lack of a built-in optical drive. Notebook hard drives are so massive these days there aren't that many good reasons to have an optical drive physically attached at all times (mine is 500GB, but I think the second generation tm2s come with a 640GB drive now). Prior to travel, music can be ripped to MP3s/FLAC, movies can be backed up to ISOs or mkvs, and games that aren't bought via DD are backed up using CloneCD or Alcohol 120%.

Now I do have an external USB optical drive that I use sparingly, though I would definitely recommend investing in one for initial software setup and ripping whatever you plan on taking with you.
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I haven't looked into putting dvds on my hard drive recently. I did it a couple times a few years ago and it was more trouble and time then it was worth. Is there an effecient way of doing it these days?
 
my main desktop doesn't even have an optical drive. no need anymore IMO... I just got a thinkpad X220 and I love it!! (no optical drive)
 
thefewtheproud said:
I haven't looked into putting dvds on my hard drive recently. I did it a couple times a few years ago and it was more trouble and time then it was worth. Is there an effecient way of doing it these days?
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anydvd is your friend.
 
Nothing stopping you from plugging in an external USB optical which you can make yourself for less than the cost of buying one. Typical DVD burner at $25-35, external 5.25" USB case for $20, and you're done. Compare that with a pre-built external USB optical (that might not have a decent burner in it) for $60+ these days.

An ultraportable wouldn't require an optical for most stuff anyway; just put installation files on a USB stick if necessary, that's a bit more efficient, or just share an optical drive in a networked machine, same principle.

As for putting movies on the drive, if you have a decent desktop machine you can use a tool like HandBrake (along with something that decrypts the DVD itself like AnyDVD or DVD43, or rip it to the hard drive with DVDDecrypter completely) and end up with a file that's roughly 1/4 to 1/6 the size and is the full movie. We're talking about SD content (720x480 max most of the time given the aspect ratios) and image quality isn't going to be a major hassle. Converting such a movie from physical DVD to single video file for use on a laptop could be a 20 minute to 1 hour task, maybe even faster depending on your desktop's processing power.

Why bother having a movie on an optical disc that requires a case (take care of your shit, people!) when you can have a few dozen movies or so on the hard drive and save battery life in the process - a hard drive will use a lot less power than an optical drive spinning for several hours and having a laser going the whole time too... seriously. :)
 
Joe Average said:
Nothing stopping you from plugging in an external USB optical which you can make yourself for less than the cost of buying one. Typical DVD burner at $25-35, external 5.25" USB case for $20, and you're done. Compare that with a pre-built external USB optical (that might not have a decent burner in it) for $60+ these days.

An ultraportable wouldn't require an optical for most stuff anyway; just put installation files on a USB stick if necessary, that's a bit more efficient, or just share an optical drive in a networked machine, same principle.

As for putting movies on the drive, if you have a decent desktop machine you can use a tool like HandBrake (along with something that decrypts the DVD itself like AnyDVD or DVD43, or rip it to the hard drive with DVDDecrypter completely) and end up with a file that's roughly 1/4 to 1/6 the size and is the full movie. We're talking about SD content (720x480 max most of the time given the aspect ratios) and image quality isn't going to be a major hassle. Converting such a movie from physical DVD to single video file for use on a laptop could be a 20 minute to 1 hour task, maybe even faster depending on your desktop's processing power.

Why bother having a movie on an optical disc that requires a case (take care of your shit, people!) when you can have a few dozen movies or so on the hard drive and save battery life in the process - a hard drive will use a lot less power than an optical drive spinning for several hours and having a laser going the whole time too... seriously. :)
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I definitely like where you are going with this. However, I am interested in finally making the jump to Bluray and with the high quality displays these days why wouldn't I. What would I do about watching HD quality movies without a bluray drive? If there is an efficient way of doing this I will be totally on board.
 
thefewtheproud said:
I definitely like where you are going with this. However, I am interested in finally making the jump to Bluray and with the high quality displays these days why wouldn't I. What would I do about watching HD quality movies without a bluray drive? If there is an efficient way of doing this I will be totally on board.
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MakeMKV is what I use. That USB optical drive of mine is actually a slim Blu-ray drive that came bundled with my tablet through some special deal.

What it does is it reads the contents on the disc, let's you check off titles, captions, and audio formats then dumps them into a MKV file (I use MPC-HC for playback). The program has a free beta/trial with a one month license.
 
You can use MakeMKV to "dump" or rip the Blu-ray content to the hard drive, and then feed that MKV file to HandBrake and crunch it down to a more respectable size but the process could take hours per movie. It's either that or deal with having 25-45GB files on the hard drive or storage of the laptop since that's roughly the average size of such rips.

After crunching them with HandBrake you'd end up with anything from about 2GB to 10-12GB on average for the same movie depending on the bitrate/options you choose. Also, note that Blu-ray content is at 1920x1080 resolution natively; there's no realistic reason to encode to that resolution for such smaller screens - even if you did find a laptop with that resolution, encoding the file down to 1280x720 resolution would pretty much look the same on such a small screen even in spite of the resolution and the actual file size would be drastically smaller, meaning you can get more movies on the hard drive for being on the go.

Simple.
 
Well, if you chose to get a laptop without an optical drive then it's pretty easy to see that carrying an optical drive - even a small on like that Asus or even smaller (assuming that stand is detachable, which it might not be) - would be impractical in the long run unless you know you're going to require one. And again, with USB sticks being so prevalent, you can generally just copy files to one of those and use it for installing software or whatnot.
 
One thing i can suggest is to buy an uber harddrive and simply start dumping your media files into it.

You don't need a dedicated file server, you can simply use an existing PC (i.e. your workstation), install a 2TB harddrive drive and share it. Use it as a centralized file repository for your other devices. Any time you come across a video that's even remotely interesting, drop it there. Any time you want to watch a movie, use uPnP and stream it from there. If you get a new DVD, use the desktop's DVD drive and have it converted and saved into the shared drive. If you're going out of the house, access the shared drive and copy it into your laptop.

The only time i've really needed to use the USB DVD Drive was when i'm installing the OS. Everything else had gone through my desktop rig.
 
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