Acer CB3-531-C4A5 - Can I use an external CD/DVD drive to watch movies on my Chromebook?

spetho2001
spetho2001 Member Posts: 8

Tinkerer

edited October 2023 in 2019 Archives

I have an Acer CB3-531-C4A5 Chromebook and would like to be able to watch movies. I see that there is an integrated Media player with Google Chrome OS and I did try to watch a movie on Amazon.com. That worked fine. My question is can I purchase an external CD/DVD drive that will work with the Chromebook so that I can watch movies from DVDs? I presume that I cannot as the external drive would require software for the interface and being there is no operating system on the Chromebook I would guess that I can not use an external CD/DVD drive. Is this correct?

Answers

  • Mary-Acer
    Mary-Acer Acer Crew Posts: 868 Acer Crew

    According to Google's support site, USB CDROM and DVDROM (read-only) devices are compatible with Chromebooks. You will need to download a player from the Google store to play DVD's though.

  • spetho2001
    spetho2001 Member Posts: 8

    Tinkerer

    Acer-Mary,

         I think you may be mistaken but I am not sure and that is what I am trying to find out. I understand the external driver works for read only DVD but I want to watch a DVD movie. I do not believe you can down load the External DVD Drive OTG Player from the Google play store on to the Chromebook as  the Chromebook does not have an operating system. Am I correct? The External DVD Drive OTG Player says it is for Android OS and the Chromebook ,like I said , does not have a operating system.

    What do you think?

    Thank you,

         TomS

  • Iteraphotti
    Iteraphotti Member Posts: 1 New User

    Chromebook runs the Linux-based Chrome operating system. Although there’s no DVD drive or CD drive on Chromebook, you can use a USB drive or SD card to save your DVD movies. Then stream them to Chromebook. But you need to make sure Chromebook can read the DVD movies you want to play. As far as I know, Chromebook can read AVI, MOV, MP4, M4V. You just need to convert your movies to one of the above formats. Or you can read this article, maybe you can get some help there: http://www.videoconverterfactory.com/tips/play-dvd-on-chromebook.html

  • kzameer356
    kzameer356 Member Posts: 1 New User
    Hi


    I read your all post and if you want best qulity movie on chrome book full freee you can use like couchtuner its full free HD qulity Movie 
     
  • anto
    anto Member Posts: 19 Troubleshooter

    Can I Use an External CD/DVD Drive with Chromebook

    Solution:

    If you’re wondering whether you can use an external drive CD/DVD with Chromebook, the short answer is yes, you can. But before you get too excited, know that there are some limitations to what an external drive can do. Let’s start with the things you can do with a Chromebook optical drive.

    Chromebooks can read these disk types:

    • CD
    • CD-RW
    • DVD
    • DVD-RW
    • Blu-ray
    • Blu-ray RW

    Chrome OS can read files from any of these disks if they are written in data or media format.

    You can copy files off optical media to your drive as long as they are actual media files, not CD music or DVD videos. You can also play media files directly from a disk.

  • AntoJoseph
    AntoJoseph Member Posts: 83 Fixer WiFi Icon

    Can I Use an External CD/DVD Drive with Chromebook

    Solution:

    If you’re wondering whether you can use an external drive CD/DVD with Chromebook, the short answer is yes, you can. But before you get too excited, know that there are some limitations to what an external drive can do. Let’s start with the things you can do with a Chromebook optical drive.

    Chromebooks can read these disk types:

    • CD
    • CD-RW
    • DVD
    • DVD-RW
    • Blu-ray
    • Blu-ray RW

    Chrome OS can read files from any of these disks if they are written in data or media format.

    You can copy files off optical media to your drive as long as they are actual media files, not CD music or DVD videos. You can also play media files directly from a disk.

  • Barr3um
    Barr3um Member Posts: 1 New User
    edited August 2018
    Of course you can try all the useful solutions that the above posts have provided. But I would never recommend directly using DVD player to play your loved HD movies on your Chromebook since the external drive is too inconvenient to carry, especially when you are on the go.

    The best way to solve your problem must be use a DVD ripper to rip and convert all of your DVDs into certain video format which is suitable to your Chromebook player. In this case, I strongly suggest you to use VideoSolo BD-DVD Ripper which I have been using for ages and it never fail 
  • myankver
    myankver Member Posts: 3 New User
    It can read the CD and DVD disc, that means it can play these. Obviously, you can play movies from disc.
  • myankver
    myankver Member Posts: 3 New User
    A thread from the buyer of Chromebook.

    No, you shouldn't purchase an external DVD drive.
    Chrome OS doesn't support optical drives (DVD / CD / Blu-ray).
    Unofficially, you can get some optical drives to work in very limited ways, but there are many caveats that make this impractical, and not very useful:
    1: Not every drive works. There is no list of drives which work because officially no drive works.
    2: You can't play DVD video / CD audio / Blu-ray video. The software packages and codecs required to do that for the optical formats don't exist on Chrome OS.
    3: The device will work as read-only at best, even if it has write capability.
    4: Some discs may inexplicably fail to read, even on a drive which can otherwise read discs. (Not every ISO format may be supported.)
    5: A drive which once worked might fail to work after a future update. There never has been a commitment from the developers that an optical drive would work in any way. The only reason some do (in limited ways) currently is because of the similarities in reading some optical media and the way external hard drives work.
    6: There is no troubleshooting procedure if something doesn't work. The official stance is that optical drives don't work at all
  • myankver
    myankver Member Posts: 3 New User
    edited June 2019
    Finally, I'm using too. Recently got DVDs of the latest movies and playing on my Chromebook. While I'm using AllStreaming website for regular updates of content.