If you’ve got a Mac or Windows PC with a Blu-ray drive, there’s an obvious draw to hooking it up to your TV if you don’t already have a dedicated Blu-ray player. A decent 4K UHD player doesn’t come cheap, and just about any recent PC will annihilate your home theater equipment in terms of performance and app support. You could finish watching Johnny Mnemonic then switch over to playing Cyberpunk 2077 in less than a minute.

Due to a confluence of factors, though, PC Blu-ray drives aren’t that well-suited to watching movies and TV shows. You can do it — but you can tell the assumption is that you’ll be handling backups and other boring file transfers most of the time. Here’s what’s going on.

Why aren’t PC Blu-ray drives right for movie night?

Blame industry priorities

Taking a step back, the first argument might be availability. You won’t find an optical drive included in any modern PC by default. Downloads are just too convenient, and many apps are too large to fit on a 100GB Blu-ray disc. You’ll need to hunt down an external USB drive, and if you want something better than a generic model from Amazon, you’re well on your way to affording a living room player.

One of the benefits of buying a name-brand drive is something you can’t avoid: specialized playback software. Your computer won’t let you pop in your copy of Dunkirk and go. Commercial discs are DRM-protected, and both Windows and macOS lack the licensed tech to unlock that encryption. If a drive doesn’t ship with a playback app, you’ll have to pay for one that supports your drive, or else turn to tools that can break encryption in tandem with a free playback option like VLC.

On their own, these issues wouldn’t matter much. What’s more problematic is format support. Most Windows PCs, for example, don’t support any HDR out of the box beyond HDR10, whereas Dolby Vision and HDR10+ are taken for granted in living rooms. Neither macOS nor Windows, meanwhile, are well-equipped for lossless Dolby Atmos. Newer installs of Windows 11 require the (free) Dolby Access app for any sort of Dolby compatibility, and there are still configuration hoops to jump through if you want to enable lossless passthrough. macOS doesn’t natively support lossless Atmos (for movies) in any form, at least as of this writing. Expect to put up with compression. That shouldn’t be a dealkiller, but it does eliminate one of the advantages of Blu-ray.

A general issue with using a PC or Mac in a home theater is control. To avoid repeatedly walking over to your TV and back, you’ll want a lapboard with a wireless keyboard and mouse, or a trackpad at a minimum. It’s worth the cost you plan to do more than play Blu-rays, but this is another instance when you might want to consider if the money would be better funneled towards a dedicated player.

A concern some of you might have is noise. PC drives are geared to spin a lot faster, since you don’t have hours to wait if you’re transferring a work project or burning a video of your own. I doubt this will be a serious distraction — yet the spin-ups might bother you if they always seem to happen during a movie’s quiet moments.

Hurdles that aren’t worth crossing

Mind the gap

A quick way of summarizing the dilemma is that a PC Blu-ray drive deprives you of the strengths of both living room players and PCs. It’s neither as plug-and-play as a living room model, nor really exploiting the full power of a laptop or desktop.

Like I’ve suggested, it might be worth putting up with some of the drawbacks of a TV-connected PC if you want to work, play games, or stream more than a TV platform’s approved selection of content. Otherwise, you should probably budget for a trip to your local big-box electronics retailer.