Playing Blue ray movies

[rnadeau]

I have acomputer with windows xppro sp3 and sagetv 7.023 installed. I want to install a blue ray drive and will be using anydvd to strip HDCP from it, so essentially I will be copying the movie to a hard drive and playing it from there. My video card does not have HDMI output and I don't have an hdtv. My tv is plugged into the svideo port on my video card. Will I be able to play blue ray movies using this setup?

[JetreL]

You should be able to, in my office I am using an old LCD as with basically the same setup except using extenders and it plays fine. The only contention I would see it your video card could possibly not play HD video well but it's worth a chance and you can get a sub $50 card if it doesn't. If you have a bluray to test that's the easiest method to figure out if it works or not. If you don't there is always Redbox to rent and test before you make the leap to purchasing. I personally use DVDFab to rip DVDs and Blurays. Best of luck!!

[rnadeau]

From what I understand the extender decodes the blue ray stream, or is it just a passthrough? My video card is a gigabyte 8800GTS so i'm pretty sure it is powerful enough , but do you have a special blue ray/ bd codec installed or do you use the default sage decoder?

[KeithAbbott]

Why not rip DVDs instead? They take up 1/4 to 1/3 of the harddrive space of a blu-ray, and you'd have full access to all of the special features and whatnot, if you desire. You'd get the same picture quality, since you are not using an hdtv. 90% of my movies are ripped from DVD, only 10% are ripped from blu-ray which are the favorites that I tend to watch multiple times, and have special effects that benefit from blu-ray.

[rnadeau]

Ripping dvd is what I have been doing for years, but I do plan on updateing to hdtv soon and just wanted to make sure that I can watch my current collection and blue ray movies until I get the hdtv. I also wanted to know what is involved in getting sagetv to allow me to play the blue ray movies as far as possible codes I might need to install to get sage to play them properly weather it is dvd or blue ray, but I do appreciate your input.