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playing blurays/DVDs on Dell inspiron 15 5000


I recently bought this laptop but found dvds don't play in the optical drive - apparently this is a common problem but I was wondering if theres any way to make the computer recognize and play DVDs. Also I was wondering about blurays - if I bought an external bluray drive would it work with this model? Also I have a bluray drive from another dell laptop that's a different make would it maybe work with this model?

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this might not be exactly what you want to hear but unless that's critical your better off using DVDs in a regular DVD (or BluRay) player.

but if the DVD's can be read by your drive it's probably a software issue if they are not playing.

p.s. i use 'Pot Player x64' (i.e. http://www.videohelp.com/software/PotPlayer ) for all of my video playback on my computer as i play back video files on my computer through it's HDMI port to the 43" LG 1080p TV (using a 20 foot HDMI cable i got online for $14) i got and it looks great with SD or HD.

Also I have a bluray drive from another dell laptop that's a different make would it maybe work with this model?

if the hardware physically fits in there and the connections are good then technically it should work. i don't mess with laptops much myself as i always been a desktop person as you get more power for less $$$ and a bigger screen. only advantage of laptop over desktop is portability.

Also I was wondering about blurays - if I bought an external bluray drive would it work with this model?

i don't see why it won't physically work.

but as far as CPU etc that might be a issue as i have not looked into required specs to play back bluray decently. but i know unless your video card is fairly old it should support DXVA (DirectX video acceleration) which makes the load on the CPU minimal to play back HD video and offloads it to the GPU(graphics card). note: Pot Player x64 supports this DXVA stuff by default (assuming your hardware supports it).

with that said... i don't think it's worth investing in bluray on a laptop as the screen is quite small on laptops in general.

just stick with "downloads" (better than messing with DVD anyways(and pretty much even bluray for that matter if you know what your doing)) or get a proper bluray player for your TV.

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