It is spring loaded. When you open the disc tray it opens enough to open the drive and closes when the drive closes. It does not go all the way down with the drive open. I have not opened it manually. You would not need to open the drive to open the front panel as noticed in the same picture. I stream from my PC. If I did need to put in a flash drive or SD card, it's not that big of a deal to open it, slap in a drive/card, and let it close back up. It is the same panel as the original BD10. Except the BD10 did not have an eject button on the remote.