playin blu ray though pc

madmanrizzla

madmanrizzla

madmanrizzla

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25 Mar 2004
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202
currently building a htpc and want to add a blu ray to it, is ther anything i need to look out for or can i just plug and play any drive/software??

Any help would be appreciated?
 
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It almost always works out more cost effective to used a standalone blu ray player.

The software is expensive and goes out of date relatively quickly.
 
/\/\/\/\/\ This. I got my fingers burnt rather badly (admittedly I did try to build a PC that would play both HD-DVD & Blu-ray way back in 2008)

The playback software alone (at the time & now) cost what it it did to buy a standalone player. It kept nagging me to buy the latest version after 6 months, it was very unstable & took hours to download what updates it needed when I bought it new. (This was cyberlinks playback software BTW) After the demise of HD-DVD was announced I gave up & bought a standalone player.
 
Yep i'm in the avoid blu ray on pc side . Been there, done it .... to expensive for what it does and way to much hassle with updates.

And that's why you don't see htpc media pc's advertised anymore
 
Grimley said:
/\/\/\/\/\ This. I got my fingers burnt rather badly (admittedly I did try to build a PC that would play both HD-DVD & Blu-ray way back in 2008)

The playback software alone (at the time & now) cost what it it did to buy a standalone player. It kept nagging me to buy the latest version after 6 months, it was very unstable & took hours to download what updates it needed when I bought it new. (This was cyberlinks playback software BTW) After the demise of HD-DVD was announced I gave up & bought a standalone player.
Click to expand...

I did the same thing at the same time, it was an LG HD-DVD Blu-ray drive. I have no idea why I got it being honest as I already had a PS3 :o

Still have it in my currant PC but never use it.
 
Bought a Blu-ray drive about 2 years ago and I've watched all but 2 Blu-ray disc films. Was a waste of money and I should have paid the extra to get a RW drive so it would've actually been useful. The data encryption layer just makes it a complete pain in the ass and having to use horrible software like WinDVD.
 
Yep. I used makeMKV but 80 rips takes up 2TB of space. So I'm currently re-encoding with handbrake. (takes about 45-60minutes each) File size is reduced to half to a third of the original & I've not seen any difference in quality yet. :)
 
You need to rip the blu ray to mkv to make it a slick set up
If you have a moderate collection you also need space and/or cpu grunt on a machine to compress

Then it works well.

I haven't done any compression yet. But I actually need to in next week or two.
 
Don't believe the ******** from Power DVD Player when it tells you that you need to upgrade. I just click ignore and they play fine. I'm sure there are a few free software blu ray players (unless I'm mistaken?). Google Free Smith player.
 
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Got to laugh... The exact thing they didn't want folk doing (copying discs) is exactly the thing that all are forced to do because of crippled playback software. Ha ha ha. Oh, the irony. :D
 
HTPC with Blu-ray drive and VLC Media Player will always be cheapest, cost effective and future proof.

Years ago after bought £259 LG DVD recorder with 250GB HDD, I realised standalone DVD/Blu-ray players and recorders was really waste of money and expensive paperweights. It was worked great with my old LCDTV but 3 years later LCDTV died then I bought 1080p LED HDTV and found out DVD movies on LG DVD recorder had worst picture quality because it did not have 1080p upscaler!!! So the solution to the problem is I had to watch DVDs on PC as it already had 1080p upscaler. I never looked back ever and regretted bought LG DVD recorder.

It amazing my PC is 4K ready and 4K Blu-ray movie ready already years before it reach mainstream. People will have same problem I had when they find out their Blu-ray Players and recorders got image quality issues with brand new 4K UHDTVs because it do not have 4K upscalers. That same problem will drag on when Freeview move on from HD to 4K UHD channels soon and then in 5 years time with 8K HDTVs. People will have to spend fortune to kept upgrade TV and Blu-ray players so they will be better off with Mini PC and USB external Blu-ray drive.

VLC Media Player is my favourite free software to watch Blu-ray movies, watch and record Freeview HDTV with HEVC codec from DVB-T2 HDTV stick which is cheapest alternative to insanely overpriced Blu-ray recorders that been discontinued few years ago because nobody buy it anymore. Also enjoyed watched Blu-ray movies streaming to my tablet and mobile phone from VLC Media Player that standalone Blu-ray players cannot streaming movies from DVD/Blu-ray discs.
 
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Buy a second hand LG/Samsung Blu-Ray drive for £35 or so and get some free software to play it? :confused:
 
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