dumb idea but might work.

[dodori1]

i have an umd drive and i want to connect it to my laptop and use the umd drives as my very own personal dvd system. so i wanted to ask is there anyway to connect the drive to my computer or if it was even possible to overwrite the umd drive? sorry if these are stupid questions just wanted to know.

 

[Ryccardo]

If you mean the parts with 2 flat cables you remove from a PSP when you convert it for an extra large battery... that's not an UMD drive, it's an UMD mechanism, to turn that into a complete drive you would need to reinvent:

• the optical pickup control (focus/tracking)
• the seek motor control
• the data readout
• firmware to control the above (and since genuine UMD discs are encrypted at the hardware level, a partial equivalent of the security coprocessor, I think it's called Kirk?)
• another part of the firmware to make the above controllable with SCSI MMC commands (the standard for computer optical drives)
• optionally, another part of the firmware to convert those commands to ATAPI or USB MSC

In other words you're missing all the electronics

 

[RAHelllord]

You can't write to any UMDs, but you could technically connect a regular PSP to your PC via USB and VHS menu allows you to let the USB connection expose the UMD to your PC like a regular external drive.
However, again, you can't write to any UMDs, you can only read from them. And afaik there are currently no media players that can handle the raw UMD data you can access this way.

The closest thing you could reasonably get to an actual DVD drive with similar aesthetic would be MiniDisc. Specifically either any of the HiMD recorders that can handle up to 1GB HiMD media and function basically like an external USB drive, or one of the NetMD recorders which do the same but can only handle regular MD with a max capacity of 330MB per disc. Those discs are basically rewritable up to a million times, but the recorder and HiMD media are pretty damn expensive and read and write speeds aare generally limited to USB 1.0, so 12MB/s in the best case scenarios.

 

[RealYoti]

I think it's called Kirk?)

Spock.