LaCie’s New External Blu-ray Disc Burner
Reads and burns Blu-ray Discs, standard DVDs and CDs
By Daniel Canale-Parola
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While much of the Blu-ray disc talk has focused on Hollywood movies and format wars, video pros, and others who work with very large files, are more interested in Blu-ray’s ability to store 50 gigabytes on a dual-layer disc. Those folks will be happy to hear that LaCie is about to release an external FireWire/USB enabled drive/burner that burns dual-layer Blu-ray Discs as well as standard DVDs and CDs.

Designed with professional video authoring houses in mind, the burner allows you to store up to 4 hours of HD video on a 50GB disc. Authored videos can be burned without any quality loss using a number of different codecs (MPEG2, AVC, VC_1) and make use of eight audio channels of 192kHz/32 streams.

The burner is expected in November and is listed on the B&H website.

Here are the specs from LaCie:

FEATURES

• USB 2.0 & FireWire interfaces
• Backward compatible with DVDs & CDs
• View BD-ROM, DVD-Video and Video-CD
• Play back high-definition Blu-ray movies
• Bundled with Easy Media Creator 8.2, Cineplayer 3.4 and Toast 7.1.1 Titanium