DVD/1080p BD movies via JRiver on Z Book Laptop Feeding 32” CRT TV (1 Viewer)

[cineescape]

I need to decide on an external BD burner drive to clone a very rare and OOP DVD movie. But I will also want that drive for sharing DVD/BD movie play duties with my Oppo 95 BD player, where the Oppo feeds the s-video input of my 32” Toshiba CRT TV in my bedroom with a pair of nice DIYed floor standing speakers with 15” woofers.

LOL, but I like the CRT’s high contrast ratio and much more that its 4:3 screen lets me view my vintage 1.33:1 aspect ratio content without vertical black bars or the content cropping needed with a 16:9 TV.

Presently, my Pioneer LX500 BD player feeds the HDMI input of this Black Box video converter.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/prod...kXjjcYevkEgIGPSCBBLPm45VD2S_d2NhoCDsMQAvD_BwE

But I want to swap out the Pioneer player with that external BD drive and my HP Z book G8 15” laptop. https://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/getpdf.aspx/c07607106.pdf

The laptop has these integrated graphics.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-RTX-A2000-Laptop-GPU-GPU-Benchmarks-and-Specs.532536.0.html

With the external BD drive USB 3.1 Gen 1 connected, the laptop’s screen will be turned off while its HDMI output feeds the Black Box converter.

My questions are when playing DVD or 1080p BD movies via JRiver on the external BD drive and with the laptop’s Nvidia RTX A2000 graphics feeding that HDMI converter:

Will picture quality look as good as on the 32” CRT fed from my $1K Pioneer player?
https://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Home/Blu-ray-Disc/Elite-Blu-ray-Disc-Players/UDP-LX500

Will the Nvidia graphics power consumption increase enough to generate noticeable fan noise while playing a 2 hour + BD movie?

Or how likely would I have to reduce the graphics resolution setting to avoid fan noise, even though the Black Box HDMI converter is outputting a low quality composite video signal?

How likely would this BD drive become noticeably noisy while playing 2 hour + 1080p BD movies?
https://www.pioneerelectronics.com/PUSA/Computer/Computer+Drives/BDR-X13U-S

Would that Pioneer model be as least as quiet as most other popular external BD drives (ASUS, LG, OWC, et al)?

And burn a copy of a DVD-R movie on the drive in my desktop pc to another DVD as reliably?

 

[DaveF]

You can rip a DVD with any DVD player and computer from the past 10 or 20 years. You can rip a BD with pretty much any blu-ray player and PC from the past decade or so. (It's only hard these days if you're backing up UHD discs and even that's pretty easy with 6-year old gear.)

A $1000 player feeding a 32" CRT for standard def video seems like gross overkill and imbalanced system components?

You need only modest integrated graphics to play content. It would only matter if you're doing transcoding and compression or were doing 4K upscaling, which I gather you're not.

No idea about fan noise from your laptop. Can't you test that yourself: put a disc in and play it and see if your laptop fan spins up?

But if you're just playing discs and not setting up a media server, seems much easier and cheaper and quieter to buy a blu-ray player for $50 or $100.

 

[JohnRice]

I have to agree. This all seems a little odd. A $1,000 UHD player, then another $250 to knock the image down to SD. It's also a lot of effort to commit to a display that could die any day. I'll just say that even a mid level QLED with full illumination and local dimming will decimate an SD CRT in virtually every way. Try a good OLED and there's no contest. Plus they don't weigh 150 lbs. and burn 600 watts of power.