Reuse of blu ray drive with raspberry pi?

Hello,

I have an old standalone blu ray player laying around and want to use it as a housing for my pi as a media player.

My initial plan was to only keep the case and power supply, but I am wondering if there is any chance of using the built in blu ray tray with the pi...

Powering the tray should be no problem but is the data connection of these trays of any standard or proprietary?

(To be more precise, its a Philips BDP3300, if this is of any help )

Any clues?

Thanks a lot!

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0 shabaz over 9 years ago

Hi,
If you meant to use it to play discs, then the answer is no, the RPI has no video inputs and so it cannot connect to the blu ray player video outputs.
Some internal connections will be standards based signals, but those that the RPI does not interface to, or cannot use for any benefit.

If you meant to just power the tray (i.e. only a mechanical motion) then that is possible - the tray is controlled by a motor.
I don't know what kind of motor is powering the tray (and pretty sure Sony won't tell you either) so some examination and experimentation
will be needed, general instructions for controlling a motor are here (PDF).
If you want to explore further then you may want to check out these electronics book recommendations that explain how to control many things with
circuitry and micro-controllers.
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0 Former Member over 9 years ago in reply to shabaz

Thanks for the quick response and the links!

I was hoping to use it to play discs with some kind of adapter or converter, such as the ones used in external drives. Say, converting SATA zu USB...
That's probably kind of optimistic, but maybe it's possible
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0 shabaz over 9 years ago in reply to Former Member

No problem, I hope it helps!
No chance to do this conversion I'm afraid. There is no SATA interface (or any other PC compatible data interface) inside a Blu-Ray video player.
They make them with integrated circuits designed for one task (video playing). The manufacturers won't waste silicon (hence money) implementing SATA in this case.
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0 COMPACT over 9 years ago

Of course you can and even retain its original functionality.
A simple idea you can use is have the GPIO to control the buttons of or as an IR Feed to the Blu-Ray player.
You can use a video multiplexer switch under GPIO control to select the video output feed.

You won't however be able to read in blu-ray data into the rpi with this simple set up.
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