Blu Ray playing blues...

[Big Jeff]

You know I was so excited of finally setting up a HD HTPC, but I think now I may have just been better off leaving my SDTV Sage HTPC box alone and should have bought a PS3 to play blu ray's.

My setup, Antec fusion case, Athlon Phenom Black (9850) quad core, GIGABYTE GA-MA78GPM mother board with an ATI Radeon HD 3200 built in with 128mb of DDR3 sideport memory with HDMI (HDCP complient), 4gb Patriot Viper 1066 RAM, SATA 3.0 750 gig seagate with 32mb cache, and an LG Bluray/hddvd player/dvd/cd super combo lightscribe burner, Hauppauge 1600 capture card (HDPVR soon).
Running Windows XP 32 bit (3gig mem limit) sp3, all drivers up to date.
Latest SageTV build.
52" Samsung 120Hz 630U LCD TV

Sage on my new machine is exactly what I would expect, flawless. Although standard def on a new HD TV is interesting and I need a solution for Blu ray playback since sage doesn't offer that.

MY experience. (YMMV) And I am glad I didn't buy any of these yet cause I would be screaming at customer service for my money back.

Power DVD 8. Completely sucks for playing blu-ray's. Iron Man won't play and it seems any newer disk I get has issues. Looking at their forum, lots of other people are having the same issues, with a solution being to move to the old powerdvd 7 until they can fix the issues. No thank you.

Total Media Theatre. Not horrible, been prety good with playback although yesterday my trial (which is like a week into it) stopped playing blu-rays. So all I get is a black screen when I insert a disk.

I would like to try to play with WinDVD 9 plus bluray, but their trial is for PLUS only WITHOUT blu ray playback.. The thought of upconverting on regular DVD's is nice as well. BUT... How the hell am I supposed to evaluate playback with my system without the ability to WATCH a BRay??

I am also not too keen on all these apps phoning home all the time for every little thing and I am not going to drop 100 bucks on crap software.

Is the issue HDCP and the MPAA and all this crap copy protection or is it just poorly programmed software. The system I have, I think is a pretty high end HD HTPC so playback should be flawless.

Is my solution to buy AnyDVD HD and rip all my B-ray disks to the hard drive and play them that way?? I would rather not as I don't want to use all that HD space when they are already on the disk I bought.

Has anyone been able to eliminate a stand alone Blu ray player with a HD HTPC?

[HelenWeathers]

My HTPC has a Blu-ray player/writer in it for two years now. (The first Sony dirve, BWU-100A). It has played everything so far with PowerDVD8 Ultra, sometimes with a software update (had to wait ~ 2 weeks for update to watch Day After Tomorrow when it came out). I have Iron Man on Blu-ray but have not tried to play it yet. I will when I'm at home tonight and let you know.

EDIT: There have been 4 firmware updates for the Sony also.

[Polypro]

TMT with AnyDVD HD has been great. It's MCE interface opens and it auto plays the disk. I launch it with Neilm's Dynamic Menu. I tried PDVD...I like TMT better. I agree that the apps alone should work...sadly I think AACS trips them up at times...AnyDVD isn't cheap, but the function and support prevent any hair pulling on movie night Version 2.1.6.125 played Iron Man fine.

P

[HelenWeathers]

Well, Iron Man is playing fine (45 mins now) thru PowerDVD 8 Ultra on my SageTV Client HTPC machine. My client is the same as my Sage server but with Blu-ray drive and nVidia 9600 GT card.

I would love to be able to call PowerDVD or TMT from within SageTV.

[Polypro]

I don't know exactly what you want, but I have a "Play Blu-ray" menu item created by the Dynamic menu...it launches TMT's MCE interface and plays the movie. When its done, I hit the Menu button on the remote and TMT closes...and I'm back in Sage (TMT runs on top...you can also sleep Sage and have it restore when TMT closes).

P

[HelenWeathers]

I am not familiar with dynamic menus. I will search for info and ask for help if I can't find anything. I'm new to SageTV so not well versed in customizing.

Thank you for the idea!

EDIT: I have downloaded Dynamic Customisable Main Menu and some documentation from wiki. Got some reading to do. Thanks Polypro for the point in the right direction.

[elaw]

Jeff,

I'll second what another poster said about AnyDVD - it's a wonderful thing to have for a bunch of different reasons.

Also, if you want to play ripped HD discs from your hard drive, your choice of player becomes much more limited. I know that as of now, PowerDVD can NOT do it (an earlier version did, but my understanding is they removed that feature under pressure from the entertainment companies). TMT (my current favorite) can do it, not sure about WinDVD.