Archive for the ‘Blu Ray’ Category

Blu Ray Update

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

The final piece of teh jigsaw was installed in my system the other day. To play Blu Ray I needed a dual core processor, as the single core processor was just not gutsy enough. It kept maxing out at 100% which made the movie play back with minor, but regular, jitters. This made watching movies very frustrating.

But now the equation is complete:

1 x Core 2 Duo Intel E2200 processor
1 x 8400 GS Nvidia graphics processor
2 x Gb RAM

with these pieces I have enjoyed my first Blu Ray movie – and it was great! The resolution is superb – highly recommended.

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Re: Blu Ray

Thursday, October 30th, 2008

Well it turns out I was not quite right – although upgrading the GPU to an 8400GS was a vast improvement, it is still not quite right. It seems that the CPU carries a bit of workload when paying Blu ray.The processor is running at between 60% and 100% during play back. And this is causing it to stutter slightly – enough to be annoying.

For the record the CPU is an Intel Pentium D 3066 MHz. So it seems that I DO need to upgrade my CPU

Which is a shame, becasue I really don’t want to. Although it does mean I can use the exisiting CPU in my yet-to-be-built home server….

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Blu Ray in VMC

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Now that the Blu Ray drive is installed, and I have gone out and bought a BR disc, I quickly discovered that my Nvidia 7 (7300GS) series graphics card was not able to handle blu ray playback. It worked but was very jittery – certainly unwatchable.

The blu ray drive comes with a piece of software that lets you know if your system is up to scratch – mine clearly wasn’t! The program said that my CPU and GPU were not able to handle playback. I suspected that the video card (GPU) ws not up to the job, but I would have thought my Celeron D processor would have been able to handle it.

So I took the cheap option and went out and bought an 8 series Nividia graphics card (8400GS), which I have just installed. And it works!! Amazing clarity on blu ray – even with my 768dpi screen (running at 600dpi).

So you need an 8 series or higher Nivida GPU and a Celeron D processor as a minimum to run Blu Ray. All we need now is for Windows Media Centre to play blu ray natively.

Hopefully this will be inplace for Windows 7….

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Re: Blu Ray install

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

I installed the Blu Ray drive last night – no problems. Just the usual, straight forward optical drive install. Vista even had a driver for it, although the bundled software did update to a newer version.

The drive installed was the highly rated LG Blu Ray / HD DVD combo – LG GGW-H20L. The drive comes with a blank RW Blu Ray disc, which is nice.

All I need now is a Blu Ray disc to play!

Unfortunately Vista does not natively support Blu Ray, but there are plugins that wil enable Blu Ray playback. This is the next thing to test. The test system has myMovies installed which tells me it can play Blu Ray discs. Which is why I need a blu ray movie – to test it!!

There is also a plug in called “Cyberlink PowerDVD Media Centre Plugin”. This plug in opens Cyberlink or Power DVD in full screen mode to play BR discs. It then closes the player and returns to VMC when done. Again, I need a Blu Ray disc to test.

I will have to get one tomorrow…

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Blu Ray in Vista Media Centre

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

I have heard that there are issues with using Blu Ray with Media Centre. So I am going to give it a go. I should pick up the drive tomorrow. If not it may be early next week. Either way I am very curious to see how it goes.

Ever since Blu Ray won the war with HD DVD I have been itching to use it, but I have had no real need to install on my personal machine – I have no Blu Ray movies and my screen only runs at 768 resolution – not ideal for Blu Ray!

From my understanding the main issues are related to the codecs. We’ll see….

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