Mar. 1st, 2010 08:33 am
I can has Blu-Ray
I now have a Blu-Ray drive in my home theater PC and it's working well for the most part. Actually, the drive is working perfectly but the Blu-Ray software (Cyberlink PowerDVD) may be down-sampling the image when playing a Blu-Ray disc. When I launch the player and start playing the disc, it comes up in a window smaller than the screen which has a resolution of 1360x768 or similar, even though the resolution of the content should be at least 720p and probably 1080p. This is likely because the computer is connected to the TV with a VGA cable. I plan to get an HDMI cable soon so there will be the full HDCP path between the video card and the TV. Even so, it looks pretty good. The drive came with the OEM version of PowerDVD 8 but I'll probably spring for the full version of PowerDVD 9 as it integrates with Windows Media Center and has additional features. The upgrade is 50 bucks which isn't too bad.