"Will an external blu-ray drive work with the Acer R13 Chromebook? I have a pretty large bluray collection and would like to be able to bring some movies either me with an external BD drive, an I going to get smooth playback? Or should I expect stuttering or not even reading the disc's?"

Chromebooks are great little machines with a wide range of features. However they are still struggling more than Mac, Windows or Linux computers when it comes to flawlessly playing video files, let alone physical Blu-ray discs. While it is possible to connect an external USB Blu-ray drive to a Chromebook, you can not currently watch Blu-ray movies by default in Chrome OS. Unlike simple movie file formats that you might find online, playback of Blu-ray Video requires special decoding software and codecs to work. Google has not licensed this software and included it with Chrome OS.

In fact, nowadays there are few ways to watch your Blu-Ray collection on your computer, to say nothing of a Chromebook, without shelling out cash for the privilege, even if you already own a Blu-Ray drive and bought your movies. Instead, it's simpler to rip your Blu-Rays to Chromebook supported video formats on your computer and then store them on cloud like Google Drive, Amazon Drive, OneDrive or a flash drive for easy access and further enjoyment. Here's the best way to digitize Blu-rays for Chromebook and how to keep your file sizes small enough to store your entire collection.

Play Blu-ray on Chromebook

This way, you don't need to swap discs, you can play your Blu-ray movies in any app on Chromebook you want, and you can even stream them to your other devices. You can even add your old collections. If you want to rip your DVDs, this process will work as well. But we'll focus on Blu-rays - our process of ripping DVDs for Chromebook is a little different.

What You Need for Ripping Blu-rays for Chromebook

● A Windows or Mac computer

● A Blu-ray disc drive. If your computer came with any disc drive at all, it was probably a DVD drive. However, you'll need a Blu-Ray reader in order to rip your Blu-Ray discs (obviously). An external good Blu-ray drive can be purchased for as little as $25.

Note: If you want to rip 4K UHD Blu-rays, you'll need to get a 4K Blu-ray drive.

● A program to decrypt and rip the Blu-ray discs. We'll be using EaseFab Blu-ray Ripper in this guide. This software comes with both Windows and Mac version.

This is all you need. Once you have all three of these things ready, grab your favorite Blu-Ray movies and get started to digitize them for further playback on your Chromebook.

EaseFab Blu-ray Ripper earns its award as the best Blu-ray ripping and copying program mainly due to its rich features, solid functions and ultra-fast encoding speed. It can easily handle Blu-ray discs with AACS encryption, BD+ and the latest MKB technology and decrypt DVDs with CSS, RCE, Sony ArccOS, UOPs, Disney X-project DRM, etc. on both Windows and Mac.

With it, you can easily rip and convert ip and convert Blu-ray main title only to MP4, AVI, WMV, 3GP, FLV or other mainstream video formats. Powered by Intel®, AMD® and NVIDIA® GPUs, the hardware acceleration can expedite Blu-ray ripping and transcoding up to 30X faster without compromising quality. Moreover, it offers a library of preprogrammed optimization profiles for specific devices including but not limited to iPhone (11/Pro/Max), iPad (Pro/Air/Mini), Apple TV, iPod, Google, HTC One, Samsung (Galaxy S10), Microsoft (WP8, Surface, Xbox), Amazon Fire phone, Sony (PSP/PS4) and more.

3 Simple Steps to Digitize and Play Blu-ray on Chromebook

To begin with, you need to download and install EaseFab Blu-ray Ripper Windows or Mac version on your computer. The guide below takes the Windows version for an example. Mac version has the same process.

Step 1: Download After downloading, install and launch the program. Insert your Blu-ray disc into your BD Drive (necessary for ripping Blu-ray) and click Load Disc button to upload Blu-ray files. At the bottom, you can select your desired subtitle and audio track.

Load Blu-ray Movie

Step 2. Click Profile bar and then choose a desired output format profile. If you'll archive the result file into cloud for playback, make sure the chosen format is supported by Chromebook and the cloud storage service you use. For general uses, MP4 (h.264+aac) in Common Video is recommended, as it's widely supported by many devices and media players.

Select a desired output format profile

Step 3. If need to get a good balance between file size and output quality, flexible options are offered to further reduce the size of the ripped video. Click Settings button below the profile and enter into the parameter settings page. A slew of other variables such the video/audio codecs, pixel dimensions, frame rate, bit rate, audio sampel rate, etc. will help convert a Blu-ray at 40GB to a smaller MP4 file to make more room for your cloud, USB or external hard drive.

Recommended video size settings:

◆ You're not suggested to adjust the frame rate and aspect ratio, if not necessary.
◆ Lower the bitrate to a lower level. Adjusting the original Normal quality to bitrates of around 1800-2000 is acceptable and can make your ripped MP4 movie around 1.2-1.8GB in size, 96% smaller than the original Blu-ray movie, and to the naked eyes, it's highly unlikely to distinguish the difference between the original movie and the re-encoded video.
◆ Lower the resolution. Typical Blu-ray videos are 1920×1080 (Full HD). Adjust the resolution to lower 1280×720 or higher won't make any quality difference.

Recommended MP4 Settings for Chromebook

Step 4. When all these settings are ready, you can click the Convert button to begin the Blu-ray ripping and conversion.

When the ripping is done, you can click on Open button to locate the ripped videos. Now, things become much easier. You can upload them to cloud storage services, such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Amazon Drive, and iCloud or your USB drive, now you're able to access to your Blu-ray file library on your Chromebook as long as internet connection is available or plug the USB stick to your Chromebook.