HD-DVD/Blu Ray software for PC?

January 26, 2009 6:38 AM

What PC software is out there for playing HD-DVDs and Blu Ray discs?

I have a HD-DVD / Blu Ray combo drive in my PC. I've been using Cyberlink Power DVD 8 to play both my HD-DVDs and Blu Ray discs, but it's not ideal. The software is bloated and wonky, and recently quit outputting audio. There must be something else out there, right?

I'm just looking for a software based movie player that will play both disc formats without a hassle. I'm not interested in ripping them to my computer.

posted by Dr-Baa to computers & internet (5 comments total)

For Blu-ray, I use Cyberlink PowerDVD too. It works well in my Media center PC with a Sony Blu-ray drive. I wish it integrated with Media Center, but for now, it works. The software responds to a Windows Media remote control as well.

A co-worker swears by ArcSoft, but I'm not sure that swapping it for PowerDVD will be better.

I couldn't find a simpler solution as it appears the Microsoft doesn't want to integrate with Blu-ray in Media Center or Windows Media Player just yet...

I can't speak to HD-DVD.

Good luck.
posted by Argyle at 7:08 AM on January 26

Have you tried VLC player? It plays pretty much everything and does a pretty decent job. There's a windows port of MPlayer also which is a good fast video player but it doesn't really have any kind of interface, it's controlled by command line options. Both of these are free and beat the pants off anything else I've run across.

I don't actually know if either would play blueray discs since I don't have a bluray drive but I bet they would.
posted by RustyBrooks at 7:41 AM on January 26

VLC and Mplayer will not play Blu-ray on Windows. They will at most split the Blu-ray transport stream and play the video and AC3/DTS audio with no subtitles and no HD audio.

Personally, what I would do is buy or pirate Arcsoft Total Media Theatre (for its DTS decoder) and Slysoft's AnyDVD to enable mounting the disc without encryption and then use the Directshow frontend of my choosing (Media Player Classic, Zoom Player, etc.) in conjunction with the Arcsoft DTS/DTS-HD/DTS-HD MA/DTS EX filter, CoreAVC to decode H.264, the native Microsoft (Vista) Mpeg-2 codec to decode MPEG-2, the WM9 DMO (comes with WMP11) to decode VC1, and ffdshow tryouts to decode AC3/EAC3/TrueHD. Note also that the new Media Player Classic fork Media Player Classic Home Cinema has reasonably good support for .SUP format subtitles like those on Blu-ray discs. To sum up:

1) This option will minimize bloat. Using MPC-HC (a fork of the lightest Directshow frontend availaqble) and only back-end Directshow splitters needs no background services. AnyDVD eliminates the need to use "rights management" in any capacity.
2) Arcsoft's DTS code is based on the reference DTS code and not only decodes all variants of DTS without limitations but does so with better quality than the current libavcodec DTS decoder.
3) Microsoft's MPEG-2 decoder that comes with Vista is pretty good and will do hardware acceleration if the right renderer/video card combo (read: anything reasonably new) is used.
4) CoreAVC is currently the best CPU-only H.264 decoder. MPC-HC has a built-in DXVA-enabled H.264 decoder that will make use of most any new GPU but it tends to be kind of buggy.
4) The Windows VC1 DirectMediaObject is THE reference decoder for VC1 and there's no reason to alter it.
5) ffdshow tryouts will decode AC3, EAC3, and TrueHD/MLP - and has been found to decode TrueHD bit-perfectly.
6) MPC-HC's internal M2TS splitter will read clip information from Blu-ray files and assign the proper language and stream number to each. Preliminary, reasonably good .SUP subtitle support is also available.

I think the above combination is currently the best option.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 8:42 AM on January 26

The software is bloated and wonky, and recently quit outputting audio

Blu-ray itself is bloated and wonky. The standard dictates a HDCP approved DRM path. Dont blame the software for the format. As far as audio goes, have you talked to Cyberlink support? I have the free version of Cyberlink on my htpc and there was a recent upgrade for it that fixed some issues. The free version is limited to 2ch sound. If you want Dolby 5.1 you'll need to pay for it. Regardless, even the free version gets limited support.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:36 AM on January 26

So you mean to say Bluray caused the program to quit outputting audio for all formats within the program (DVD, HDDVD, and Bluray)? Yes I agree that Bluray has a bloated overhead, but I find it hard to believe it completely broke the program on its own.
posted by Dr-Baa at 7:32 PM on January 26