Hi, I'm a very newbie.

I'd like to get a bluray drive for my Debian based server (Open Media Centre). A local shop sells two models:
- LG bh16ns55
- Pioneer BDR-209

I have used Pioneer in the past, but the LG model supports BD-XL for future compatibility I think. I do not know if Pioneer will/can do this via firmware in the future or not?

However, I still haven't verified if either model has linux drivers. LG Support has told me their model does not, Pioneer I've read does have a driver, but I've not verified it yet??

Can anyone help me, as I do not know where to find out for sure which one would have a linux driver?

TIA

Maybe this is a dumb question, after searching more I read that optical drives all use the same interface and so should just work? Even bluray drives, is that correct? Any advice appreciated

I have no Blueray driver myself but from the online search it seems that it does work with generic drivers.

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The bluray has been supported by Linux on this laptop since it was bought - 7 years ago. Close enough to 8 years - March 2010.

I've never tried to write to media tho'.

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Thank you, this is what I read, but I was just hoping people could verify.

Does anyone have the models listed, that they could verify work? It would make it much more straightforward for newbies like msyelf When I see hardware with only Windows versions listed, it scares me off using Linux :S

It doesn't matter that they are blu-ray drives. They are sata devices and will work fine. They do not require specific drivers.

Both are pretty good drives that have been bought by many users. A friend of mine has the lg and i have the pioneer one (BDR-209D if it makes any difference). I do not think you will have any problems with either one of them.

I do not have any bd movies so i can't tell you how easy it is to watch movies (i read that even nowadays movie playing is not very easy and that you have to first rip it to hdd in order to watch it). I use it for backups with cdrecord and it works perfectly.

Edit: Please tell me if i haven't answered sufficiently or if you want me to try something.

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Thanks, as I mentioned I just couldn't find any information on whether the drives work or not. Even LG told me it would not so made me wonder. But thanks for verifying!

In general, an optical drive will work in linux.
However some issues could affect this.
One is an oddity of the drive. I've had drives that needed a boot time parameter.
Another is that blu-ray discs may be difficult to read in linux. Not all the protection of the media has been (shall we say) defeated.

There may be some region issues with some media/drive and it may relate to who sold you the media/drive.

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Companies always say "we do not support linux" but i understand it with the meaning of "we do not make drivers for it" and "if the components hangs the machine or if there is any instability at all, don't come to us". It doesn't mean that it won't work at all.

Yes, that is what i meant about media playing is not easy. I follow the KEYDB "development" and have all the latest movie keys but i haven't bought any bluray yet so i haven't tried it. Maybe it doesn't apply today, but i read that you need to rip it to the hard disk (decrypting it in the process) and only then you can watch it. This discouraged me from buying any bluray movie because waiting to rip 25-50GB just to watch a scene or two is annoying.

As a backup drive, though, it works perfectly. Besides bd-r discs, i also bought some bd-re discs which i use with rsync to backup data that are changing often.