I have browsed CDRking on various occasions over the past decade or so, but never bought anything from them. I tended to look at eBay for the odd tech gadgets since I prefer to use PayPal for such purchases. As for Company Man, I enjoy his videos because of the extensive research he does into the companies featured.
In computer news, I am tweaking my LowEndMac setup a bit. My main art iMac, the 2008 model, will soon become the secondary studio computer while my 2011 iMac, Lilly, will become the main art computer along with being the VHS transfer device. This will allow me to use my 2009 MacBook for audio recording purposes. My 2020 MacBook Pro will once again be the TV recording device since I don't do much TV recordings outside of holidays.
The reasons are rather simple. Other than VHS transfers, Lilly has just been sitting idle most of the time. There is also a very annoying bug with Vivaldi running on the 2008 iMac. Vivaldi is still supported on ElCap and runs very well for such an old machine.... except when it doesn't want to. There is this very odd bug that only occurs with the 2008 iMac. Every now and then, the whole Vivaldi UI will freeze up entirely, requiring a force quit, sometimes happening three or four times in a row before the browser works properly. This never happens with other Chromium-based browsers on the same iMac, and the bug doesn't occur on the 2011 iMac or even the 2009 MacBook. Lilly also has full 8GB RAM and a quad-core i5. It's quite dated now, but it's still leagues above the 2008 model. Lilly also has High Sierra, which still has a lot more software support. That last point may be important since I switched over to Affinity Designer for my work, and I don't know how much longer current versions will support ElCap.
The LG BluRay drive also arrived for the Dell rig, and it was a bit of a process to get installed. The Dell case is easy to work with, but it took a while to remove the metal plate in the secondary drive bay. I was able to burn a data BD-R successfully with Windows Explorer. There is an odd quirk... the drive shows up as an SDHC device (complete with icon) despite Windows properly reporting it as a BluRay Disc recorder.
As for playing BluRay movies, it's a whole different can of worms compared to the simplicity of playing a DVD. You can play BD movies using VLC, but it requires installing a couple different dll files for working around BD encryption as well as searching for access keys in case a particular disc doesn't work. I may end up just buying PowerDVD or WinDVD for simplicity's sake, but here is a Reddit thread discussing VLC BD playback:
https://old.reddit.com/r/VLC/comments/ee...h_blurays/
In short, Hollywood got it's way with BD playback on computers, making it very hard for users to play their own movies using free software. A standalone BD player for the TV is looking more appealing...