YCC Team Ultra Slim 9.5 mm USB 3.0 External Blu-ray Burner, DVD Burner, Silver

I am waiting for a blu ray to start playing. I've been doing this for two days. If you enjoy standing in line, you will love the blu ray/computer experience. I have yet to get a blu ray to play on this burner. I have yet to try to burn one. My supposition is that if it won't play one, it won't burn one. To begin with, my laptop with Windows 7 and USB 2.0 played a DVD fine. I had no success with a blu ray. When I ordered it, I checked all my computers, which most of run Nero V10. Every machine had a Nero Blu Ray player. I am not really interested in paying $39.95 and up to play a blu ray when you can buy a stand alone player for well under a $100. The laptop gave me an error code so I moved the burner to a desktop that runs Windows 8.1 with Nero 2014 and it's blu ray player.When I tried a blu ray through a USB 2.0 jack, Nero told me I needed “patent activation” to play a blu ray. I was easily able to perform the “patent activation”, over the internet. I tried a James Bond blu ray and it just spun away for thirty minutes or so. I then plugged the burner into a USB 3.0 un-powered hub and it spun away for thirty minutes or so. I ordered a powered USB 3.0 hub from Amazon and I am returning the un-powered one. An un-powered hub is useless for hard drives or optical disks or pretty much anything, as far as I can see. Since the burner uses the USB plug for power, I should have known it wouldn't work through that kind of hub. By the way, it wasn't Nero's fault that USB 2.0 wouldn't work the way I was trying to hook it into the system.I received my new USB 3.0 hub and hooked up two USB 3.0 hard drives and a USB 3.0 SATA hard drive converter with a hard drive plugged in and the burner. I put the James Bond disc in the burner, now running through the USB 3.0 powered hub. The light came on and the disc has been spinning away for about thirty minutes. Nero would not even load the menu. I did get a studio logo with another disc but that is the closest I have gotten to getting a blu ray disc to play, yet.I downloaded MacGo, a free, (trial, of course*), blu ray player and for the last thirty minutes, the disc has been spinning away. I have a thumbnail sized photo showing Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry and a “please wait” instruction with “Die Another Day” printed next to the photo.I emailed the Nero folks, whose idea of support is to sell you the newest version. Here's a clue, Nero, When I have a version of software that I like and works for me, I don't want to spend money to buy an “upgrade”, which is usually just a revamped interface that moves the buttons that were on the left to the right and vice versa! I asked for “Patent activation” on the other two versions of Nero on the other two computers and they asked me for serial numbers, which I sent. They responded with “We no longer support versions prior to version 11.” I didn't need support, I needed the blu ray player I paid for to work!Nero's service has always been useless. All they want to do is sell you the newest version, in which the “upgrades” may not even be to your liking. Personally, I like the older version of the DVD creator for editing. I know that's subjective but some things are fine the way they are. I want and expect additional features for my money. When I bought the 2014 version, I expected to get a couple of new menus and templates. It had new ones but you couldn't access them! There was a button on the new ones telling you that you would get them when, guess what, you upgraded to the next version! I am now in the marked for any decent video suite that includes blu ray playing and burning with some simple editing capabilities for a reasonable price.NOTE to NERO; If I'm going to “upgrade”, I'll do it with anyone but you. Why would you think I would buy more software that you won't support in a year or two. If your goal is to win the “The worst service in the industry” Award, you will get my vote. As a sidebar, “patent activation” is not support. I paid for a blu ray player and it doesn't play blu rays. I don't require support, I require getting what I paid for.To sum it up, the blu ray burner is still spinning. Neither the only version of Nero I have that has a working,(?, not yet), blu ray player nor the MacGo free trial has allowed me to play any blu ray. Don't waste your money. It probably works fine as a DVD burner, I know it will play a DVD. I was hoping for more. Thank God and Jeff @ Amazon for their customer friendly return policy. The burner and the hub are going back. Neither one worked at all. Totally useless.*Free trials are nice but it shouldn't cost $39.95 for software to simulate a $59.95 stand alone player.

UPDATE 9/03/2015: I have been using the drive for several months now and I have put it to the test transferring data and watching many movies. I still highly recommend this drive. It has had no issues performing at or above my expectations after continued use.I have been very satisfied with this drive so far. I was a bit wary of ordering it since there were no customer reviews prior, but after reading the reviews on external blu-ray drives on Amazon, I must say that this one was a good value.First, the package is very generic. In fact, it doesn't say anything about Blu-ray at all, which made me a bit nervous. But that was as far as my reservations went. No instructions or drivers were included, all packaging is in English. Includes the drive and a foot long USB 3.0 cable. Physically, the drive feels pretty solid. The outer casing is aluminum, and it is very slim and lightweight.I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. This drive is USB 3.0. One cable powers the drive. My computer does not have USB 3.0 support, but the drive plugged in and Windows immediately recognized it and found a driver almost instantly. I was a bit shocked at how quickly it was ready to go, especially having read so many reviews on other drives regarding the difficulty of finding a driver. Windows recognized the drive as a BD drive in My Computer, and it also recognized the Blu-ray disc that I loaded into it for the first try.Playing the Blu-ray is where many people may get stuck, especially if your computer does not have a program that can play Blu-Ray discs such as Cyberlink PowerDVD. If you have VLC media player, you can use the method here: http://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name/ which will allow VLC to play some Blu-ray discs. Discs with BD+ copy protection are not supported by this method, however, so you'll have to purchase a good Blu-ray Player software if you want to be able to play everything 100% of the time. I suggest Aurora Blu-ray Media Player (http://www.bluray-player-software.com/). It has worked well for me, and the price isn't as high as Corel WinDVD or Cyberlink PowerDVD.I will be trying out various other features of the drive as time goes on, and hopefully update this review as I see fit, but for now, I can recommend this drive as a great purchase for the price!Edit: Changed my approach for playing Blu-ray discs. Right now, there doesn't seem to be a free way to play discs with BD+ encryption, so your best option is to buy software to play discs. I have happily been using this drive for several months now, and it has worked excellently. I've played several movies all the way through with no problems from the drive. It's generally quiet during movie playback, but can get a bit noisy when the drive first spins up. I highly recommend this drive to anyone looking for a well-constructed lower cost Blu-ray drive.Still have not checked writing capabilities for the drive.