Spiderman 3 blu-ray pc problems

[fizzy]

Hi,

Any other early adopters of blu-ray on pc here?

When dvd's first starting appearing in the states a fair few years ago, I started off with a hardware decoder card and dvd rom drive for my pc. Later upgraded to a proper stand alone player etc etc etc...

Looks like its pretty much gone full circle - invested in a blu-ray drive, Ati 2600xt card and Powerdvd ultra. I bought windvd 8 a while ago but just cannot find the hd upgrade/add on anymore.

Anyhow, bought a few blu-ray titles - had problems playing "Fantastic Four - Rise of the silver surfer" but have managed to sort that out with a powerdvd update.

Just picked up Spiderman 3 - and that just starts a blank screen and thats it. Nada. Nothing. It would also appear that a number of standalone players need firmware updates to play this film too....? Strangely enough it apparantly works fine on the ps3, and guess who is a big contributer to the Blu-Ray scene......

I didn't have anywhere near as many issues with early DVD stuff on the pc, but this blu-ray/hd disk stuff is a nightmare!! I jujst want to watch hi def films, not have to worry about upgrades and the like every time I buy a new film...

Anybody else have such issues?

- Ian.

 

[fizzy]

Well, looks like the spiderman 3 issue is down to software.

PowerDVD ultra is currently the only active pc software - dunno whats happened to windvd HD or the update for the standard version.

I even went so far as to buy the "hd/blu-ray player option" for nero - and its quite frankly rubbish! It doesn't seem to support commercial film releases at all... thats £15 or so down the pan then.

After some searching of forums and the like, tracked down a trial copy of "Arcsoft Total Media Extreme" - which includes "digital theatre" which plays spiderman 3 fine! Problem is its the japanese copy so I can't check/make sense of the settings. Its currently using the cpu only for decoding, so pretty much max's out my cpu even at 2.5 gig! No idea if it does/will support hardware assistance from cards such as the 2600xt. Theres an english trial version out soon apparantly so should be able to check on that one.

At least I know that the disk and hardware are ok now.