Difference between a drive and a player?

Question

I'd like to be able to rip Blu Ray discs to my computer, but Bly Ray drives are pretty expensive. What's the difference between a computer drive and a player that connects to a TV that makes the drive so much more expensive? If anything, it seems like the player would need more processing power to actually interpret what it reads, but the drive just needs to pass information from the disc to the computer.

Is there a way one could take a Blu Ray player and turn it into a Blu Ray drive that could connect to a computer?

Answer 1

To clarify. You are differentiating between the computer drive(that would I suppose look like a DVD drive). Compared to the device that attaches to a TV.

The device that attaches to a TV is very polished and fit for display, and has built in software to interpret the disc into a picture and just output the bits of display to a monitor. And it has buttons to control the operation of the reading of the disc.

The computer one just reads the disc in the format that it is, which is probably not yet ready to be outputted to a screen. It would still have blueray specific things, not quite fit ready yet for a TV that doesn't care about blueray formatting and does care about the formatting the TV uses.

Here is something about Blue-ray disc formatting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Directory_and_file_structure

HDTV no doubt has its formats (Whose differences may be of a more electronic signalling nature)

http://www.hdtvfaq.org/hdtv-formats.html#hdtv-formats

The device that has a socket for a TV, does these conversions.

I checked whether any TVs support blue-ray (if they did, then I suppose you could say the raw data is fit for a those TVs) but they don't.
http://hometheater.about.com/od/blurayhddvdfaqs/f/blurayhddvd10.htm

That link mentions about players having composite or component adaptors.. That is referring to those coloured jacks. e.g. a red yellow and white. And it mentions about players having HDMI connectors. That would be because that is all TVs are supporting. The player is doing the conversion. The computer drive isn't. But you could connect a Blueray drive to a computer e.g. laptop, and then the laptop via HDTV, to a TV screen.

Answer 2

certainly

A drive. has its own buffer, direct connectivity to your display device, and all its processes are focused on play the disc

Commonly a drive can be ported to be an "external drive" with a proper case. Like old mutimedia cases for dvd-players which where nice.

Just like with buy an HD case + HDD is cheaper than buy an external HDD, but in most cases you don't have the same features like the anti-sochk

A player, I not just software (?) share pc resources measured by your OS who don't think that play a movie is more important than any other thing.

Please tell me if a player is not just a software.