Got the drive. Spiffy. Has all the SW and cables. But .....

- My video card was not compaible (I had thought it was)
- My HTPC is not fast enough (I had thought it was) Edit: I might be OK on this after all.

Word to the wise ... (I'll post some more details of my installation issues later)

Once resolved, it will be awesome - alerady the portions of 5th Element that I have gotten to play have me drooling for more .... but I gotta upgrade the CPU (a 3GHZ P4 HT with 1.5 GB ram - it's too slow!). CyberLink test program calls for minimum 3.2 GHZ P4 or 3.0 GHZ Pentium D. Edit: A good video card saved the day I think. Maybe it wasn't configured for the HW acceleration when I first tried it - now all seems OK.

I have 2 HTPCs, one with AGP bus and one with PCIe. I bought two cards - ATI HD2600 Pro on sale at BestBuy for $99 each. Now everything passes the CyberLink compatibility test except the CPU power of my baby HTPC. And sure enough, the playback is jerky. Now to test everything on my adult PCIe bus HTPC upstairs. Can't wait ...

Edit: Upstairs HTPC has plenty of jiuce to spare (whew!). In fact I had VLC player and Cyberlink Ultra playing the same DVD simultaneously from the same LG drive - get this, USB attached using that cool gizmo that interfaces anything to USB 2.0. Cyberlink with it's auto recognition of ATI HW acceleration blew away VLC player. I was using a 8-9 mB/s good quality DVD. It upscaled to a very nice picture indeed - not HD of course, but the best I have ever seen a regular DVD. Don't think a 5 mB/s style DVD would look as good.

My test BD 5th Element was running at about 20-30 mB/s and was stunning as you would expect.

My only regret in all of this is that I didn't plan well when I bought my original ATI 1050X cards - they don't do HD. But the HD2600 Pro makes everything look amazing - my PC screen, regular DVDs and of course the BD. So I didn't get away as cheaply as I expected. Now I even have to upgrade one of my HTPCs - but the results really are quite nice.

Thanks once again for the tip on the LG drive. Works well, comes with all the SW and cables, and runs smoothly and quietly hooked up as SATA or even over one of those SATA-USB gadgets. I'm happy. 

Might be a good time (last week might have been better) to mention the Cyberlink's BDHD Advisor.  It's free and will tell you if it thinks some component(s) won't support HDCP.  When i ran it it knew my video card wouldn't cut it and it was right.  When i replaced the card with a newer one (Asus [nVidia] 8500) the tool recognized it, as did PowerDVD fortunately.

It still thinks my Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz is marginal.    I haven't watched a whole movie on the PC yet so it might be right.  I was amused by the the fact that the biggest CPU hog so far was the menus on the BD Die Hard films.  Their animated menus firewall the CPUs.  Actually watching the movies the CPU is well below 50%. Go figure.

Stupid Blu Ray.

So here I am all psyched to watch my first blu ray disc, a shiny new copy of Across the Universe. I load the disc, the menu loads nicely then BAM, a whole lot of nothing.

The menu sits there all pretty, cycling endlessly, but the options are either completely non-responsive or say "Prohibited" when I click on them. From what I can gather even though I fully updated Power DVD, I will probably need to wait weeks for yet another new patch for Power DVD before this title becomes playable. If I go by the recent issues users have had with discs like 3:10 to Yuma and Live Free or Die Hard, that is. What kind of deranged monkey designed a system that requires you to wait weeks after buying a disc before being able to play it?

On the plus side, the catalogue Blu Ray discs I also purchased today as well as every HD DVD I threw in the drive all played beautifully.

Hi Guys,

For you information - I've got the LG GGW-H20L and after initial easy install of drive and a few test SD discs everthing looked good. On trying BD Deja-Vu and Spiderman 3 however problems getting past menus and sometimes just no picture at all although it looked like disc was still playing. Upgrade of firmware to Y02 however seems to have cured all problems so far.

I bought another couple BD titles today, including 3:10 to Yuma. I was pleased to see that the latest PowerDVD patch let me play it just fine. No word back yet from Cyberlink on when I will be able to play Across the Universe. 

Do you mean 5.1 over HDMI? Because the full retail version does not support that either from what I have read. The OEM version that came with my drive supports multi-channel analog as well as SPDIF. I use SPDIF because my home theatre set-up is in another room from my computer and I don't fancy running all those cables. From what I have read you will actually get better sound from the analog because it allows for the full scope of the lossless audio tracks, much as you would from a stand-alone player using analog instead of SPDIF (HDMI is still preferable). SPDIF will only transmit the 'core' of the track, which is the still fine DD & DTS standards we have grown used to with DVD. In the case of Blu Ray and uncompressed PCM, I have found that all you will get over SPDIF is the left & Right channels.

I also heard a rumour that Power DVD will be adding support for full HDMI 5.1 audio in version 8. I will be pleased if true.

Quoting mediadogg:

Quote:

I should mention that I had a prior version of PowerDVD 7 installed - perhaps that's why I got the upgrade. Not sure.

When I tried to install the latest upgrade I just got an error message that I didn't have a previous version of power DVD installed or it was out of date.

I was able to install the upgrade from the LG suite update page but it's several build numbers behind the retail version.

The LG cyberlink updater only shows me build 3516. But everything I have so far works with it, including Sunshine.