Oppo BD95 as a streamer

[Reid Malenfant]

Perhaps some nice kind person could help out a streaming thicko here

I have an Oppo BD95 universal player that has an E-SATA socket on the rear of the unit. Apparently it'll recognise FLAC & other goodies sitting on an external HDD & act like a streamer.

But just what the heck is an E-SATA cable?

Am I being naive in assuming that all I need is possibly an external HDD in a caddy, PSU for the HDD & this E-SATA connection thing?

Apart from files on the HDD of course


I'd like to give it a try & I'd like to get things organised so I don't have to pull everything out of the rack again to install it.. So sooner the better really

[Tim]

Yup, you have pretty much got it right Mark - eSATA is just an external SATA connection and many external Hard Drive enclosures have eSATA connections, so all you would need is to plug it into the OPPO and away you go playing music files.



eSATA is a different connection to SATA but thats the only difference, you can connect ordinary SATA drives to an eSATA socket.

[Tim]

I'm just looking for some caddies for you, eSATA ones tend to be a little more pricey than a USB external drive. You can buy a nice caddy by Lian Li or IcyBox with an eSATA connection and just pop in your own hard drive.

[Reid Malenfant]

Ah, cheers Tim, at least I wasn't a country mile out after all

[Tim]

Here's a couple of starter's for ten - you should have the idea now.



http://www.amazon.co.uk/Icy-Box-Ib-3...tp_s2_edpp_url

Lian Li make very good quality enclosures, with single bays all the way up to 5 like this one.



http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lian-Li-eSAT...263799&sr=1-28

[Tim]

Ah, cheers Tim, at least I wasn't a country mile out after all

Nah, spot on really - its just another connector which should give you the same transfer speeds as fitting a SATA drive internally to the motherboard. Very popular with folk who build their own music streamers who don't want to fit a mechanical drive inside the player box, but still want the same transfer speeds. Some caddies don't give you the exact same transfer speeds, but you are still way ahead of a USB connection.

[Reid Malenfant]

I guess I'll be needing a quality DVD/CD ROM drive to rip with to won't I Lappy drive not really up to the job.

Some kind of software as well? I can rip to an ISO file, but I'm not sure if the Oppo will recognise it or not..

This is where I start not knowing a lot


Cheers for your help so far fella

[Tim]

Here's a bunch of eSATA drives;
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_...omputers%2C230

You can rip with a lappy, but it's not really ideal, depends on how many CD's you have and if you are going to rip one after the other. Doing it properly with proper software like EAC or dBpoweramp and the drive will get hot very soon, which can induce errors. It's also a lot slower than a full speed optical drive. You would need to rip your music files to FLAC I believe, ISO will use up too much space and I'm not sure it would mount or recognise and ISO music image. ISO would be good for movies however, so you could get a large capacity eSATA drive and rip both CD's and DVD's to it having both FLAC for the music and ISO for the movies. I reckon with your DVD collection you would need a big feck off eSATA enclosure though with a forest of 3TB drives in it

[Reid Malenfant]

He'll, there's loads of them

So which software rips to FLAC & is free or cheap?

You can forget the DVDs going on there & I have about 700 blu rays & they certainly aren't

[keiths]

So which software rips to FLAC & is free or cheap?

EAC is free, dbPowerAmp is cheap ($38). I use dbPowerAmp and find it excellent.