What's the minimum hardware specs for Blu-ray?

[nycguy]

Hi. I was wondering if somebody with experience can tell me if my hardware is good enough to play bluray. I'm planning on getting an external bluray drive for laptop and want to make sure it will play without any problems, both on the laptop and by using my HDMI-out port. The laptop specs I have are: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 Ghz 64-bit with 2MB Cache, 4GB RAM, and 128MB GeForce 8400M GS. Is this good enough? I think it should be good enough but some people say you need a 256MB video card for best results. I'd like to know from those who have personally tried.

Also, I'm just wondering - what are the minimum hardware specs that anyone here has been able to get bluray to play well on?

Thanks. I appreciate it.

[shiloto]

Your computer is good enough. The processor can do all the work. I too have a C2d 2ghz,2GB ram - can play any movie.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Indeed. A 2GHz Core 2 Duo should be fine for pure software playback, possibly a tad bit low for high bitrate H.264.

I don't think the 8400m GS supports DXVA either.

Still, it should be perfectly fine.

~MiSfit

[DJ Bobo]

The GeForce 8400GS is able to decode blu-ray movies in hardware (http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=168180), don't worry.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Nice! I wish I'd known that... my old laptop had the Quadro variant of the 8400. It was only a 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo, so it hiccuped a bit here and there for high bitrate H.264. CoreAVC mostly solved the problem ;)

~MiSfit

[DJ Bobo]

It may be a driver issue.
I heard that Quadro cards have different drivers that are optimized for graphics creation.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Indeed. Quadro drivers are quite different from GeForce drivers, even if the silicon is quite the same.

In my case, I couldn't even install the nVidia reference drivers. I could only use Dell's drivers (which were ~ 2 years out of date hehe). Windows 7's auto-update pulled down MUCH more recent drivers!

~MiSfit