Slashdot Mirror
Blu-Ray and HD-DVD Playback Under XP
An anonymous reader writes "In the last few weeks the first HD-DVD and Blu-Ray drives for PCs have slowly trickled onto the market. Up to now, it has not been clear what system requirements you need to actually be able to play HD-DVD and Blu-Ray discs. The operating system was the main cause of concern; many rumors cropped up that the new generation of video discs would not work under Windows XP. Hardware.Info put the question to Cyberlink, the company behind Power DVD, if the lack of a protected videopath in Windows XP would make it impossible to enable HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback. They have answered the questions, and provide a complete checklist of what you need to play Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies in HD resolutions on your home PC."
Forget it. The article may as well suggest paying the movie industry a ransom directly. HDCP is a useless mandated solution in search of a problem.
What's powering the damned players? Is this all OS overhead and panicky DRM safeguards, or are they actually churning out set-top boxes with dual cores, flux capacitors, and proton packs?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
funny part is that non drm HD quality and resolution mpeg4 content can play on paltry Celeron 2.4ghz processors with 512 meg of ram and a crappy video card.
I demo real HD content on a HTPC next to a HDDVD to a customer and they love the HTPC's picture over the HDDVD player. BluRay is not even HD quality yet as they do not have dual layer discs available yet so they are EDDVD instead of HDDVD.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The dual core and 256 MB of video RAM does seem a little steep. I currently watch lots of quicktime trailers at 1080p, and haven't noticed any dropped frames with an AMD 3200+ and an ATI x550 (128 mb). I don't even see how dual core would come into it. I highly doubt that the number of cores will make a difference if you're just running a single process to display the video.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
To enable HD resolution playback of an HD-DVD or Blu-Ray videodisc your monitor, graphics card and the driver you use have to be compatibe with the HDCP standard.
Bugger. That's me out in the first round. I'm not going to replace my good equipment, and especially my fantastic 19" CRT monitor, just to get 'high resolution' videos to play.
Graphics cards are even worse, there is only a handfull of cards out there that sport HDCP support.
Yes, and even those you buy yourself might have HDCP, but they won't have it switched on. However, many OEMs 'in the know' like HP, do. Sounds like lock-in to me.
The purchase of a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player will therefore have no added value to a normal DVD player without HDCP.
Fantastic. I'm sorry, why do I need to monkey about getting high definition content on my PC again, and why would I want to pay more money for HD discs over DVD when there's no benefit whatsoever? That sounds like a lovely way to get a new format to take off. Not.
I downloaded that checker and bugger, I can't play high definition disks. I'm...really...devastated.
I don't understand these recommendations at all. First off, as others have noted, HD playback is indeed possible with single-core CPUs. Second, the video card shouldn't have to have 256MB Of memory - video cards have supported resolutions higher than 1920x1080 ("1080p") for years, so video memory should be a minor concern. Finally, unless the HD-DVD and Blu-ray consortia are putting extra restrictions on PC playback (over and above those on current HD-DVD and Blu-ray players hooked up to TVs), HDCP won't be an issue until a content provider decides to enable the ICT flag - no current releases do, and supposedly the major studios have an agreement amongst themselves not to do so for at least a few years.
In short, I find all of this information suspect and most likely just a way to get people to buy more new hardware. Since Cyberlink makes most of their money from OEM deals, they have a large incentive to do so.
A QuickTime trailer is typically H.264 Main Profile @ 10 Mbps CBR. HD DVD supports VC-1 or H.264 High Profile @ up to ~27 Mbps, plus picture-in-picture video overlay, plus subtitles and graphics, plus up to three 7.1 audio tracks mixed in realtime (main audio + commentary + UI effects).
Ther's a LOT more going on with these formats than just playing back a single moderate data rate file! Look at the above, and you can see why multiple threads + GPU decoder and rendering asssist are extremely helpful.
My video compression blog
> That was the grandparent post's whole point. If (in a magical fantasy land) the formats didn't get
> cracked, no one would buy in, and the formats would rot, which would be a good thing.
Why would it be a good thing?
Fact: DVD is near the end of its life for a high quality movie format. Disney titles for the kids? Another ten years, just like VHS is still clinging to life if that niche. A format to drive a 50" HD monitor? No.
Fact: Any new format will have all the DRM the industry thinks it can get away with.
Fact: The original plan was for Vista to be a TPCM only horror, and for HD content to only be playable on PCs with TPCM (ie. Vista and OS X on Intel). Hollywood had banked everything on that and was betrayed. (Nobody ever wins in a 'partnership' with Microsoft.)
Fact: If either/both of these new formats catch on they will be good enough to last 10-20 years, like DVD's eventual lifespan will probably end up and about like VHS's reign.
Fact: If both fail, by the time Hollywood is ready to try again we might not be lucky enough to get something so crackable.
Fact: If Hollywood has TPCM it is possible they might actually design something that can't be cracked. Or at least not cracked effortlessly, as DVDs are now. Microsoft's failure with Vista is our opportunity, we should seize it.
Democrat delenda est