Perhaps you need to expand your circle. My 360 add-on was a used drive, and it still works. Yeah, there are some turkeys out there. It's probably because people bought Sony drives thinking they were actually good. (Did I say that out loud?)
I bet those $600 Plextor drives will outlive your computer. However, I would consider the Pioneer then the LG drives before the Sony and Lite-on drives based on personal experience. Too bad Toshiba doesn't make Blu-Ray drives (or players for that matter).
Back on topic... the fun part is making sure your display, graphics card and sound system are all "secure" via HDCP. Otherwise, the evil Hollywood types will lock out high definition sound and graphics. Hopefully you have a card with HDMI or HDCP-enabled DVI along with a display that does the same. Moreover, I hope you have a card with hardware decoding of VC1 and AVC as those tend to make mincemeat out of (especially single core) CPU's. If that part is done, then you can now look to software. Most of the playback software sucked. PowerDVD now has profile 2.0 enabled Blu-Ray playback. If you want HD DVD playback, well... you will need an older version of PowerDVD. (Sigh...)
