So what are you using to play Blu-Ray disks on your PCs?

[Bateluer]

I recently bought a BD-ROM drive, which came with the absolutely craptacular PowerDVD 8. PowerDVD insists on shutting off Aero to play a BluRay movie, and doesn't support mouse interaction in the menus.

WMP/WMC and VLC wont play BD disks due to licensing issues, unless they've been ripped/transcoded.

 

[abaez]

I used WinDVD9. But nowadays I just straight rip it uncompressed with MakeMKV.

 

[ScottSwing]

MakeMKV.

 

[yh125d]

I rip the .m2ts with anyDVD and use MPC-HC to play it

 

[AndroidVageta]

I use PowerDVD10...ripping them? How much space does that take up people??? I mean, I have 2x1.5TB hard drives and like 200+ Blurays (lost count )...I couldnt imagine the space needed for 200 disks...

 

[Bateluer]

I use PowerDVD10...ripping them? How much space does that take up people??? I mean, I have 2x1.5TB hard drives and like 200+ Blurays (lost count )...I couldnt imagine the space needed for 200 disks...

Converting them to MKV compresses the videos something like 90%, or so they claim. Its a lossy format, but the quality is pretty good from what I've seen of MKV files. Haven't made any myself yet.

Kinda curious to let my Atom 330 machine try.

 

[rcpratt]

I use PowerDVD10...ripping them? How much space does that take up people??? I mean, I have 2x1.5TB hard drives and like 200+ Blurays (lost count )...I couldnt imagine the space needed for 200 disks...

Usually 10-15 GB/movie.

 

[JoeBleed]

I rip the .m2ts with anyDVD and use MPC-HC to play it

Same, with anydvd you also don't have to rip it to the hard drive. I can play them directly from the blu-ray drive with mpc-hc. I'm not sure if it is ripping parts to a temp location for active play but it seems ok performance wise.

I recently bought a drive too and started playing with different trial versions of the newest powerdvd 10, total media center, and windvd. Windvd trial however doesn't seem to support blu-ray playback it told me when trying....

I didn't really like the layout of any of them either way. I'm am much more use to mpc-hc and its keyboard shortcuts. The only thing that i've seen is that i haven't found away to access the specal features with it, Just the movie only. Which is typically ok with me.

 

[JoeBleed]

Kinda curious to let my Atom 330 machine try.

Can't speak for mkv files, but direct ripped blu-ray content will not work on a n450. It acts like there isn't enough through put to handle the data let alone cpu. The n450 is a single core at 1.60 ghz though. It will play robocop ok though, So the 330 may stand a chance being a dual core and having more cache to work with. Would probably be close though.

Some of the netbooks bassed off the n450 are offered with some HD video decoding assistance. But it ads a bit to the price too. Mine doesn't have that.

 

[Bateluer]

Can't speak for mkv files, but direct ripped blu-ray content will not work on a n450. It acts like there isn't enough through put to handle the data let alone cpu. The n450 is a single core at 1.60 ghz though. It will play robocop ok though, So the 330 may stand a chance being a dual core and having more cache to work with. Would probably be close though.

Some of the netbooks bassed off the n450 are offered with some HD video decoding assistance. But it ads a bit to the price too. Mine doesn't have that.

I don't think the 330 is going to do much better. Had a Dark Knight BD rip I was testing out, failed miserably.

 

[yh125d]

Same, with anydvd you also don't have to rip it to the hard drive. I can play them directly from the blu-ray drive with mpc-hc. I'm not sure if it is ripping parts to a temp location for active play but it seems ok performance wise.

I recently bought a drive too and started playing with different trial versions of the newest powerdvd 10, total media center, and windvd. Windvd trial however doesn't seem to support blu-ray playback it told me when trying....

I didn't really like the layout of any of them either way. I'm am much more use to mpc-hc and its keyboard shortcuts. The only thing that i've seen is that i haven't found away to access the specal features with it, Just the movie only. Which is typically ok with me.

Wait you're streaming with a drive with just anyDVD and MPC? Mind giving a short walkthrough? I've messed around with it a bit and couldn't find out how. Its frustrating when I want to watch something I haven't ripped yet but have to wait 30-60 mins for it to rip instead of streaming (I had a free version of powerdvd with my drive, but I can't get it working anymore)

 

[JoeBleed]

All i did was to let anydvd do its thing, when it was done in a few seconds, opne mhc-hc and selected file, Open DVD, and in the path just selected the drive with the disk. Leave it at the root and don't look for the video files.

Thats all i did. Right now i'm still just using the trial version of anyDVD because i'm still testing some other stuff.

The build of mpc-hc is the current/older one they have on their page from late 2009, 1.3x on a clean win xp and win7 installs for tests. That one has some issues with some disks and their codecs. The newer build that comes with the current k-lite codec pack (mega) works fine. To get hardware acceleration you have to add filter blocks to block ffdshow. At some point i hope to look into compiling my own build from their current sources to try it with no additional codes installed.

Also, if you have xp and want to play directly from the disk, most likely you will need the udf 2.5 driver to be able to view the disk contents, otherwise it just appears to be an empty/blank disk. In my search for the udf driver i read that some people's xp installs could read them and speculation was it was included in some media center only update. I never found out for sure. If you can't see the disk contents of the blu-ray disk then you can't play directly from the disk. It is my understanding that vista eventually got the udf driver from microsoft. I don't have nor want vista so i can't say for sure if it does or not. Win7 will read all of the few disks i have on a clean, non-updated and updated install without a problem.

 

[yh125d]

All i did was to let anydvd do its thing, when it was done in a few seconds, opne mhc-hc and selected file, Open DVD, and in the path just selected the drive with the disk. Leave it at the root and don't look for the video files.

Thats all i did. Right now i'm still just using the trial version of anyDVD because i'm still testing some other stuff.

The build of mpc-hc is the current/older one they have on their page from late 2009, 1.3x on a clean win xp and win7 installs for tests. That one has some issues with some disks and their codecs. The newer build that comes with the current k-lite codec pack (mega) works fine. To get hardware acceleration you have to add filter blocks to block ffdshow. At some point i hope to look into compiling my own build from their current sources to try it with no additional codes installed.

Also, if you have xp and want to play directly from the disk, most likely you will need the udf 2.5 driver to be able to view the disk contents, otherwise it just appears to be an empty/blank disk. In my search for the udf driver i read that some people's xp installs could read them and speculation was it was included in some media center only update. I never found out for sure. If you can't see the disk contents of the blu-ray disk then you can't play directly from the disk. It is my understanding that vista eventually got the udf driver from microsoft. I don't have nor want vista so i can't say for sure if it does or not. Win7 will read all of the few disks i have on a clean, non-updated and updated install without a problem.

Well I'll be damned, it does work. Guess I'm just a moran.


I'm using up to date MPC and win 7. If you're debating on buying AnyDVD, I don't regret my lifetime license I bought a year or two ago

 

[JoeBleed]

Yea, with in 20 minutes of playing with the trial i decided it would be money well spent. I just haven't spent it yet. How do they do their licensing exactly? Any activation involved or anything like that or just enter in a key they e-mail you?

Thanks,

Edit: oh on opening the disk. On dvd's i always use the open disk option. But it is grayed out with blu-ray disks. I just decided to try the open dvd option and it worked. Was that what you were trying to do?

 

[yh125d]

Yeah just a key


I don't remember what I was trying to do, i haven't messed with it since I bought anydvd, which has been a year +

 

[djnsmith7]

PowerDVD 9 plays the discs just fine & also plays .iso files when using Virtual CloneDrive.

 

[abaez]

Converting them to MKV compresses the videos something like 90%, or so they claim. Its a lossy format, but the quality is pretty good from what I've seen of MKV files. Haven't made any myself yet.

Kinda curious to let my Atom 330 machine try.

I thought MKV was just a container?

 

[Bryf50]

I thought MKV was just a container?

Correct. And it usually contains H.264 video which is the same thing blu-rays are already encoded with. So the only way its gonna be 90% smaller in .mkv is if the quality is reduced significantly.