Pioneer Electronics BDR-S13U-X 16x Internal Blu-Ray BD/DVD/CD Writer, Black

One quick note. Unit is longer than most blue ray players, so if you buy an external case, measure it! My case did not fit. i did a frankenstein thing and jammed it in there but it is not pretty. I just done care about pretty in this case.The drive is all advertised. I rip old blue rays I bought like Andromeda which was 25 blue rays, It handled most of them, with about 2 or 3 not completing rip due to bad sectors in the middle. I have a secondary drive by Lg the BP60NB10 also so0ld at Amazon that I use a backup and it was able to ipt those blueerays.That said, there have been time the LG has the same problem and the Pioneer works instead. They pretty much cover each other. Good to have both.

The Pioneer Electronics BDR-S13U-X (from the United States) is not what it is advertised to be. It is a Pioneer Electronics BDR-S13J-X (from Japan). The applications software that I use is not compatible with the Pioneer Electronics BDR-S13J-X. I am going to return this BDR-S13J-X drive until I get the correct one as the Pioneer Electronics BDR-S13U-X.

I was specifically was interested in playing and burning 4k Blu-ray Discs. Whit this DVD burner I can do neither.

This thing plays discs that skip on my other players. Seems pretty bulletproof so far. I'd buy it again.Edit: I see a lot of other people saying this won’t play 4K discs on their computer. They need to look into MakeMKV and VLC media player. In MakeMKV’s preferences, theres an integration tab. Check the box for VLC. That allows you to watch movies straight from disc. To watch in VLC, when opening the disc. Check the box for ‘No disc menus’ and choose Blu-ray for the disc type. Done.

I regret ordering this because I specifically was interested in playing and burning 4k Blu-ray Discs. I was not aware that you need a CPU and motherboard with support for Intel Software Guard (Intel SGX). I studied this topic for quite a while and was unable to determine if there are UHD Blu-ray players that exist on PCs/Windows platform that don’t require Intel SGX. The weirdest part about this is that newer Intel processors bought in the last couple of years don’t even support SGX either, only 9th and 10th generation Intel CPUs support this, so it seems like a weird requirement for a BluRay player/burner released in 2023.

Most media has gone digital, but I still hang onto my Blu-ray discs. My PC that I build a few years back had a DVD drive and I had an old Panasonic Blu-ray home theatre system from way back. We've retired all our DVD and Blu-ray players in house (except the XBox One S we have) but I miss playing my movies occasionally and pulling out a player, connecting it to the TV and setting it up is a bit much. Replacing my older DVD drive with this Pioneer drive was an easy way to be able to watch those Blu-ray (or even DVD) movies whenever.This is a simply plug-n-play device and the computer should automatically detect and install it for you. I am using a PC running Windows 11. As I mentioned, I removed my existing DVD (SATA) device and used the bay and SATA cables for this drive instead. DVD's played without issue and I forgot how what use to be "good" quality now is bad compared to the better resolutions we have today. When I tried a Blu-ray, nothing happened. It seemed to know I had a movie disc in the drive but it would not play. I then downloaded the software that is "bundled" with this drive using the included key found in the manual. That allowed my to play my movie.Blu-ray loading time is faster than it was on my old Blu-ray system but it still took some time for some disc. Image quality is of course better- hurray! I still can't believe how different a it looks going from DVD to Blu-ray - of course if I were to actually pull out and dust off a DVD of a home movie of when my son was younger, I'd probably wonder how we were able to watch that.I haven't tried using this to burn any disc, I haven't done much of that for a long time now actually! The included software suite has a few programs that you can use for various projects, but again I haven't delved too much into it except for the movie player. Also I had to take some of those programs out of my startup apps because they can be annoying.

I've never used a BD writer before. There have been needs but, I worked around it. Given the opportunity to try this out, I figured to give it a shot. Pioneer has been around forever and is one of the longest running companies involved in optical media.For starters, I'm on the fence regarding the Pure Read tech necessity. You can buff discs to restore functionality but even I know those only go so far if the scratches are deep enough. I don't have a lot of CDs with bad scuffing but some I've lended out to others do. Sometimes I've had CD players or other drives refuse to read them. This drive read them and handled them decently. So the tech is working as advertised.Ultimately, if you need tech like this, you may be someone who has a lot of old optical media that has quality issues. It could save you time buffing everything since this gets around that. To me, it's a bit niche. Is it worth the price for you? I'd really ask yourself that question. On top of this reading tech, M-Disc recording is one great perk of this. In a quick glance, I don't see others besides Pioneer doing it.For me, I see the value in the M-Disc since I will use that functionality for my business where I'd need long term storage that will be sturdy. The strength of this drive is definitely for compiling and cataloging and doing it on sources that are not in great shape. If that is worth the price to you, get it. If you just need a simple M-Disc drive, probably go a lot cheaper.I'm impressed by this drive, it's overkill for me but I think for someone else who needs this type of device, this is just what you'll need. Thanks for continued support of optical media Pioneer, happy to recommend!