Blu Ray on the computer: Anybody done it yet?

[Santilli]

Hi
I'm wondering if anyone has tried the new Blu Ray players/burners, and, what their experience has been?

Which version of PowerDVD, and if burning, which version of Nero, and, how well does it work?

Newegg has this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106259

which looks like a turnkey for playing Bluray on my computers.

This player works with Vista, and, since I'm running 2003, and the other computers run XP Pro, that's a concern.
Also, the 'software' doesn't say what they ship the retail version with. Is that just a driver disk?

It looks like not one of the retail Blu Ray players, except for the external one, comes with Blu Ray playing software.
Looks like only Cyberlinks' PowerDVD Ultra 8, 100 bucks,
plays Blu Ray:
http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/products/popcompare_1_ENU.html

So, those burners are really around 250-300, with software.

Xbox3 is looking better all the time...

 

[Stereodude]

First, it's a PS3, not an xbox3. The xbox 360 does not have a blu-ray drive and can't play Blu-Ray discs. The PS3 has a blu-ray drive and can play 'em.

Second, I have Blu-Ray & HD-DVD playback in my HTPC. That Lite-On drive is by no means a complete solution. There are necessary CPU, video card, and monitor requirements too.

Most moderns dual core CPU's can play back Blu-Ray or HD-DVD discs from a processing standpoint thanks to H.264 and AVC acceleration from the video card, so that's not a big deal anymore. However, if you want to play back a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD and watch it on a monitor or TV via DVI/HDMI you will need both a video card and monitor that have HDCP support.

Retrofitting a PC specifically to play back Blu-Ray discs is not good idea. A PS3 is cheaper and easier. However, if you were going to build a new PC and you spend a few extra bucks to equip it with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD playback that's not a bad idea.

 

[ddrueding]

If all you want to do is watch BR movies, an external player is likely the cheapest way in. I thought the XBox only did HD-DVD, and the PS3 did BR? If you want to be able to copy your BR disks, there is theoretically software that will do it with a PC. I did it with HD-DVD movies, but have gome back to DVD, because I don't feel the increased file size is worth it for most films.

 

[Mercutio]

The main problem with Blu Ray is that the library available to date completely sucks.

I have two drives (a burner and a player) and two movies (Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2).

I use PowerDVD8. The licenses can be had on Ebay for about $5.
I have it working on Server 2003, so I imagine that it will work on XP just as easily.

Nero Showtime from Nero Suite 8 will also play HD content.

I don't like doing HD on Vista because Vista insists on outputting it to HDMI (which I am using for video but not audio since my receiver doesn't do HDMI and my TV doesn't have super expensive nice speakers) instead of my sound card, and I have not figured out how to make it behave properly.

 

[Stereodude]

The main problem with Blu Ray is that the library available to date completely sucks.

I have two drives (a burner and a player) and two movies (Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2).

I haven't bought very many Blu-Ray discs myself. I rent quite a few of them from Netflix. There are some decent titles on Blu-Ray beyond SM and SM2. The Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Casino Royale, Underworld, etc...

 

[Mercutio]

I rented "The Golden Compass" but I don't see any reason to own it.
The only Disney titles I'm genuinely interested in are the Fantasia discs. And honestly, for a cartoon, I don't really see a difference in quality for being DVD vs. HD.

Digital Playground has some porn titles in Blu Ray, but hilariously the "showpiece" ones (Pirates, for example, or the Island Fever movies) are only on HD-DVD. Also, porn even in HD is disgustingly easy to steal.

I bought the drives under the assumption that eventually something interesting would be released. It just has not happened yet.

I'm watching Stardust on HDDVD right now.

For what it's worth, HD DVD players are dirt cheap now and so are movies.

 

[Stereodude]

For what it's worth, HD DVD players are dirt cheap now and so are movies.

I have a stack of them now. Got 8 of them for about $55 a little more than a week ago.

 

[Santilli]

I stand corrected. It's a PS3, and they are around for about 400 bucks, for the cheap one. That's out.

Looks like the DVD's from the video store are getting to be a bit more, Merc. About 400-500, from my quick glance. I've got the 3 ship at a time, 3 free movies on return at the video store deal from blockbuster. works great, until you've gone through most of their movies, at the store.

HD looks 3-D on the Samsung 21.6", and, the ATI 1650 seems to handle everything very well. It's even running
Far Cry at Very High settings, I think thanks to the 512 mb of VRAM. The dual Xeon's are 2.8 ghz, and don't seem taxed with Power DVD 5, 6% cpu usage, or playing HD stuff full screen. Like 30% processor power, or less. With other stuff going like typing this...

Thanks for the suggestion of looking on ebay. Kulalempur, 15.00?

intresting...

 

[Santilli]

The ATI 1650 will run Ultra High settings in Quake 4, with anti-aliasing off, provided I turn off the second monitor.

Doesn't seem to like the second monitor being on, period...

 

[Mercutio]

From an HD-watching standpoing, you'll be better off with a more up to date graphics card. Fairly modest cards from ATI (x2400s and up, basically) and from nVidia (8400s and up) have at least some support for offloading HD-video decoding onto the GPU. This is a good thing.

 

[Santilli]

That would be nice, but, so far, no one's setup a faster AGP card, that has consistent drivers. HIS and a few others are adapting faster gpus, but, seem to not have software that uses the features the gpus are capable of.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161226
HIS doesn't look like it's support is real good.

Sapphire's appears a bit better:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102730

 

[Stereodude]

You're pretty much out of luck with an AGP system not running Vista, and I'm not sure even that will do it.

 

[Santilli]

Why am I out of luck?

 

[Stereodude]

Why am I out of luck?

Because your CPU is not fast enough to playback the movies without heavy assistance from the GPU, and nVidia doesn't make any AGP cards that can do the assistance. ATI does, but my understanding is that the acceleration only works under Vista (but I haven't kept up on it really close over the past few months).

 

[Mercutio]

AMD's 780G platform, however, offers real, modern, integrated GPU that does support such playback assistance, and it's priced fairly reasonably. You could certainly build a modest new machine around such a motherboard for around $250 (motherboard, CPU, Power Supply, RAM), compared to the $100 you'd spend for an AGP Radeon 2600 or $200 you'd spend for a 3650.

 

[Stereodude]

AMD's 780G platform, however, offers real, modern, integrated GPU that does support such playback assistance, and it's priced fairly reasonably. You could certainly build a modest new machine around such a motherboard for around $250 (motherboard, CPU, Power Supply, RAM), compared to the $100 you'd spend for an AGP Radeon 2600 or $200 you'd spend for a 3650.

But does the acceleration work under non-Vista OS's?

 

[Santilli]

OK:
From ATI white paper:
"The Radeon X1000 family is also ready for upcoming video formats and display formats. In
particular, it is the first product line capable of accelerating encoding, decoding, and playback
of H.264 and VC-1 codecs, which will form the basis of the next-generation Blu-Ray and HDDVD
formats."

"The Radeon X1600 Series is designed to deliver the best balance between 3D performance and
cost, while maintaining the full feature set of the high-end X1800 Series. It allows the new
generation of games to be experienced in their full glory without making a large investment,
and its outstanding video and display capabilities make it the ideal foundation for Media PCs."

ATI seems to think duals are the new waive of cpus, and will be great for gaming:
"Dual Core CPUs
While GPU performance has increased dramatically over the past few years, improvements in
CPU performance have been much more gradual. The result of this trend is that 3D
application performance has in general become steadily more CPU-limited and less GPUlimited.
The recent introduction of dual core CPUs promises to help break through this
performance plateau, and provide significant improvements as software takes greater
advantage of multithreading optimizations.
The new generation of GPUs must be able to deliver better image quality per frame on existing
CPUs, and also have additional power to take advantage of dual core CPU performance as they
become more prevalent."

Intresting, since I've had dual cpus for a long time...

 

[Stereodude]

Hey, don't listen to us. Try it and see.

 

[Santilli]

Well, I have with HD TV. It plays perfectly on the Samsung screen, with beautiful color, and uses 20-30% of the cpu power avaliable.
I was also wondering if you knew of some other way of having the gpu take part of the processing load, other then the above codecs...and, what exactly it is, so I can look for it. Guess I'll look at Mercutio's 2400 card and above, and see if I can figure out if anythings really different.
200 bucks is a bit stiff right now for a USB to computer external blue ray player....

 

[Mercutio]

You can get a decent BD-ROM drive for $120, Santilli.

 

[Santilli]

Thanks Sam.

Just got the DVD Ultra software for 17 dollars.
One step at a time...

 

[Stereodude]

Just got the DVD Ultra software for 17 dollars.
One step at a time...

I would have "borrowed" it from Usenet before buying it and finding out you're SOL.

 

[adriel]

Yes blu-ray was what forced me to leave P4 / AGP / 875. And that was a Shuttle box so I was very upset to have to trash everything. It's weird that the P4 system lasted so long, 5 years.

Dual-view is an issue if not all devices are HDCP. So it would be necessary to use software such as Anydvd. That is my situation with a VGA monitor + HDMI projector. I have to use Anydvd or buy a newer monitor.

50 ft. DVI to HDMI cable is used to watch movies, works great.

Recommend a real 1080P projector. Mine is just 720P. From 12 ft away and 96 inch diagonal, the picture is clearer etc. due to the better codecs, but it doesn't have the sharp detail it should.

 

[adriel]

It is funny how $350 got a P3 back in the day. No piece cost me more than like $130 assembling the new blu-ray compliant computer. I suppose that is the genius of 9600GT and Wolfdale E7200. So much performance for so little.