ASENT Media Centres – Blog

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…

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….