If you have a sufficiently quick processor and graphics card, you can equip your PC for high-definition movie playback with relative ease. Here's how to get a Blu-ray disk working on a PC; here we've used an internal Sony BWU-100A drive.
Video decoding
Blu-ray, like HD-DVD, supports three different video codecs: Mpeg2, VC-1 and H.264. While the first Blu-ray movies were encoded with Mpeg2, newer (and probably all future) titles will employ the more efficient VC-1 and H.264 formats.
VC-1 and H.264 offer superior quality to Mpeg2 at the same bit rates, but at the cost of higher processing overheads. This doesn’t pose a problem for consumer Blu-ray or HD-DVD players, which employ dedicated hardware to take the strain, but they can prove a struggle for all but the quickest PCs.
You’ll need two things in order to watch Blu-ray or HD-DVD movies on your PC: a software player that can understand the new codecs, and quick enough hardware to do the maths.
In terms of software, the only viable option right now is Cyberlink’s PowerDVD Ultra, and version 7.3 adds support for PCs lucky enough to have both Blu-ray and HD-DVD drives fitted. It costs about £60 from
www.cyberlink.com.
In terms of hardware you’ll need a graphics card that supports H.264 acceleration (that means a minimum of an Nvidia Geforce 6600 GT or Ati X1600). You’ll also need to download the very latest drivers. You’ll still need a quick processor, though, with a single or dual-core Pentiums clocked at 3.2GHz or 3.0GHz, respectively, or an Athlon 64 4000+ as a minimum.
Copy protection
Blu-ray and HD-DVD both support the High Definition Content Protection (HDCP) system. HDCP is only supported by digital connections like HDMI and DVI, and it was long believed that you’d need HDCP-compatible displays and graphics cards to watch any Blu-ray or HD-DVD movie.
Today, though, it seems you only need HDCP-compatible displays and graphics cards if you want to watch Blu-ray or HD-DVD using a digital DVI or HDMI connection. If you go for an analogue VGA connection instead, you could be enjoying HD movies in their full glory, without having to invest in HDCP hardware. Well, for now anyway.
The big issue is the Image Constraint Token or ICT flag which, when present on any content, tells the player it must reduce the quality over an analogue connection. Luckily rumours suggest the movie studios unofficially agreed to avoid ICT flags on discs until 2010, which is great news for owners of non-HDCP displays and graphics cards.
In practice
Setting up a PC to play Blu-ray movies is simple – as long as your hardware meets the minimum requirements. We fitted the Sony BWU-100A Blu-ray internal IDE drive to systems running Windows XP and Vista, and both operating systems recognised it straight away, reading CDs and DVDs without additional software.
To record Blu-ray discs or play Blu-ray movies, you’ll need to install specific software and the Sony drive is supplied with a suite of suitable Cyberlink products. Wanting to support both Blu-ray and HD-DVD drives on the same PC, though, we used our own copy of PowerDVD Ultra 7.3.
As expected, digital DVI connections were only allowed for movie playback if both the display and graphics card supported HDCP, although switching to an analogue VGA connection eliminated the need for HDCP hardware.
Blu-ray movie playback was smooth on our Core 2 Duo E6700 and Core Duo T2600 systems equipped with Gigabyte NX66256DP Geforce 6600 and Sapphire X1600PRO HDMI PCI Express graphics cards, respectively. The right graphics driver is crucial, though, and while the latest are the safest bet, you may need to roll back to an earlier one.
Format wars
It’s possible to equip a media PC with the capability to play either Blu-ray or HD-DVD movies, or even have the so-far unique capability of supporting both rival formats in one box.
Of course, they remain rival formats and it’s unknown which (if either) will triumph over the other. At the time of writing, Blu-ray drives were also pricey – at about the £400 mark – although they also offered recording facilities.
Microsoft’s Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive may not record but, at £130, it’s a much more palatable option for equipping a PC with HD movie playback capabilities, especially at a time when the outcome of the format war is far from certain.
