InfoCynic
10th November 2008, 22:42
I have a PC running XP Media Center Edition 2005 with an HDCP-compliant PCIe video card running HDMI output to a 40" Samsung TV. It handles 1080p samples (in MKV) fine using the Media Center interface (ffdshow for decoding the h264).
I'm contemplating getting a blu-ray drive for this machine since I don't have any other blu-ray player and it seems likely to be less expensive than a PS3. I spent some time searching the forums here but can't seem to get a clear answer on playing actual disks... a little digging at some other sites (GreenButton, AVS) suggested that the best approach was using PowerDVD Ultra and some MCE helper files/scripts to launch PDVD.
Alternatively, long-term I'm thinking about moving all my media to hard disks / NAS on my home network so that I don't have to find the disks (or worse yet, get up from my seat! :))... what kind of issues will I run into trying to play backups of blu-ray disks? I currently use DVDFab HD Decrypter to backup my DVD disks and MCE will play those fine, treating them exactly like real DVDs with menus and all that jazz.
It wasn't clear from my 20 minutes searching whether a simple solution existed for these scenarios, and whether these solutions, if any, were actually compatible with XP MCE or required Vista.
I'm contemplating getting a blu-ray drive for this machine since I don't have any other blu-ray player and it seems likely to be less expensive than a PS3. I spent some time searching the forums here but can't seem to get a clear answer on playing actual disks... a little digging at some other sites (GreenButton, AVS) suggested that the best approach was using PowerDVD Ultra and some MCE helper files/scripts to launch PDVD.
Alternatively, long-term I'm thinking about moving all my media to hard disks / NAS on my home network so that I don't have to find the disks (or worse yet, get up from my seat! :))... what kind of issues will I run into trying to play backups of blu-ray disks? I currently use DVDFab HD Decrypter to backup my DVD disks and MCE will play those fine, treating them exactly like real DVDs with menus and all that jazz.
It wasn't clear from my 20 minutes searching whether a simple solution existed for these scenarios, and whether these solutions, if any, were actually compatible with XP MCE or required Vista.