Pioneer Electronics BDR-XS07UHD 6x Slot Loading CD DVD BluRay Portable USB 3.1 BD/DVD/CD Burner Supports Blu-Ray, BDXL, and M-Disc Format, Black

If you are into ripping your 4K movies to your NAS or other media storage and you don't want to have to change the built-in firmware by flashing your drive, this is the perfect solution. I had seen a post elsewhere that this drive had been given new firmware which removed the ability to rip 4K movies, but I just received mine two days ago and it works like a charm using MKV to rip DVD's, Blu-ray's and 4K movies. The drive is tiny and takes up very little space on your desktop, partly due to the slot loading design. The drive in my desktop computer would rip DVD's and Blu-rays with MKV, but not 4K discs, so I was studying the methods of flashing SOME existing drives with new firmware, including mine. However, my drive in my computer was not among those which could be flashed, so I had to get a new drive, but I didn't really want to have to remove my old drive and install the new one (most of those that are 4K ready are internal drives). Then I ran across this one on Amazon and took a chance that it would work as the reviews stated...to rip 4K movies with MKV. It works great an is pretty fast and quiet. I have been able to rip all of my 4K movies to my NAS and they play back just great using the player on my Hisense 4K TV. Oh, and delivery from the vendor was super quick to boot!

for 4k, this is so much better and faster than my previous solution, a full size asus in a 120V powered enclosure with USB2 data. I had 3 BDR-XS06 slot loading pioneers, nice but which don't work for 4K. Plus the bulky asus which i use for 4k. i use 1 USBC port for my disk array and have 3 available for BD drives. so even though this is crazy expensive i'll buy 2 more so that all my drives are 4K compatible. USB2 on the asus doesn't matter for speed (it's plenty fast enough for BD reading), but it is very convenient to need only the usbc cables everywhere. fantastic product. 10 years old!!! but makemkv has only supported it since about Feb 2022.

Well, I finally got into UHD. Disc(s) & player. Wanted to backup my UHD disc(s). DVDFab (which i bought) does not recognize this drive. DVDFab does recognize my BR player, but not the UDH. "makeMKV" shareware version, so far, has the UDH backing up. MakeMKV v1.17.3 win(x64-release) started Using LibreDrive mode (v01.0 id=CA5C627C459A) Backing up disc into folder ... Evaluation version, 30 day(s) out of 30 remaining Downloading latest HK to ... Loaded content hash table, will verify integrity of M2TS files This was just delivered today, makeMKV installed today, started backing up today. No firmware update. AMD 3800x Raedon RX 5700 RT 64 GB Ram

The main reason I bought this was to play normal and 4K Blu-Rays. It's relatively easy to everything up for regular Blu-Rays (use VLC and then download some libraries). But I haven't been able to play 4K discs because, as one other reviewer said, the 1.03 firmware doesn't really work. I suspect it's not jiving with my AMD CPU or GPU. There was a review from early last year by Adamknowsbest that said this worked for him, but I think that's because he got a device with old firmware on it. I'm not able to flash this drive to put on the old firmware and the MakeMKV forums say the same thing. I think if you had an Intel CPU with a motherboard that has SGX this will work because I sort of remember reading a Reddit post from 8 months ago where they toggled that feature off and on. So you might have better luck there. Other than that, it looks sleek and seems to have high quality construction.

Purchased this drive as the reviews stated it was capable of handling my UHD needs for gaining access to my media for storage. Unfortunately when I insert the media it reads the disc BUT it is unable to retrieve it off the disc for a copy. I wanted to make sure it was UHD only and inserted a standard Blu-Ray and it gathered the data without a problem. So the drive itself is locked out of UHD files. If you want to use it for Blu-Ray the drive will work fine out the box but if you want to use it for UHD find another option as this drive is not the one for you. October 2024 they ship with 1.0.3 firmware if that matters or not.

I have one of those new M1 Macs, and I was a bit skeptical about it not working because of the firmware only being updated since Catalina. When I initially got the drive, I hooked it up to my old MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2012) running Windows 10 Pro, and it was really noisy that I couldn’t sleep while it was operating. Today I tried hooking it up to my new MacBook Pro (13-inch, M1, 2020), and not only does it work, it runs a lot quieter than on my old MacBook Pro. It’s definitely worth the investment because it can even read discs with scratches and smudges, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a Blu-Ray optical drive for their Mac, or even just a drive that’ll operate quietly throughout the night.

I use this primarily with MakeMKV to convert my movie discs and put them into my home media server. It can handle 4k perfectly and has LIBRE support. It performs about the same as a full-size 5.25 SATA unit - which is rare for a portable USB unit. I only have a few hours on it so far so I cannot speak to the long term reliability or support. But I expect it to work perfectly for my needs. UHD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD, CD, it can handle them all. I especially appreciate the slot-load version of this drive - no tray to deal with. I am delighted by how QUIET this drive is. Extremely smooth transport on it. Many of my previous portable disc drives were noisy and shake quite a bit at high rotational speeds. But this one seems to have exceptional balance and dampening built in. I have no negatives to report. So far I am very pleased with this unit and highly recommend it.

EDIT: I've had to come back and update this review sadly. Initially, when I wrote this review, my drive had 1.01 and 1.02 firmware. The drives worked great back then and this was easily a 5 star drive. Since then, Pioneer has come out with a 1.03 firmware which has basically neutered the drives. One of my drives I kept on the old firmware and I decided to update the other drive to the newest 1.03 firmware when the firmware was initially released. That was a mistake. If the drive has 1.03 firmware, you'll no longer be able to view UHD blurays on unsupported hardware in VLC or other media players. It's a shame. Pioneer basically hurt themselves as seen by all the recent negative reviews and people returning their drives as a result of the loss in functionality. It's a fine drive for use with CDs/DVDs and regular Bluray disc, but for UHD Blurays, I can no longer recommend this drive, or Pioneer drives in general at least not in their current state, unless Pioneer decides to release another firmware which reverts the drive back to it's former functionality. There's no way to downgrade the drives which is the worst part. I'll leave the original review below for historical purposes. So, I've had this drive for about a year now. I like it so much I later bought another to have as a second drive. There are a lot of misconceptions about this drive and Pioneer drives in general. Yes, this drive will rip at full speed. However, in order for that to happen, you need to ensure you download the Pioneer BD drive utility from Pioneer's website and ensure you set the drive to "Performance mode" in the easy setting tab. This will improve the responsiveness of the drive and increase the speed of your rips if you plan on backing up your media. By default the drive, at least the one I received, was set to quiet mode which, as the name implies, is more oriented for playback and ensuring the drive operates as quiet as possible in use. The other misconception about this drive is the bundled PowerDVD software. Yes, you'll need an intel CPU that meets the requirement of having SGX to play UltraHD Blu-ray discs IF YOU PLAN ON USING the PowerDVD software that is included. However, and this is the important part, you do NOT need an intel CPU to enjoy UltraHD movies on your PC. I've played many UltraHD movies and my pc has a 5950X AMD CPU and so therefore my PC does not meet the requirements for playback using the bundled software. Here's the thing. If you're like me, and you don't own an intel CPU, or perhaps you own either a newer or older intel which doesn't support SGX, you simply need to download software which supports Blu-ray disc playback that does not utilize the SGX requirement. In this case, I simply use VLC. Insert your disc into the drive, go to media, open disc, choose blu-ray as disc type and the drive which has the disc inserted. Enjoy :)