Anyone have experience with PowerDVD 9 for bluray playback?

[ack]

I am getting into HD video and have spent the last week endless hours figuring out a good graphics card and HDMI-enabled computer monitor for bluray burning and playback. To that end, I ended up with PowerDVD 9 for playback, which freezes up randomly.

Does anyone have any experience with this subject? If so, I'll post more details.

Thanks

 

[ack]

Since I started this, I might as well provide some info on what I ended up with, just in case someone takes the same path in the future:

1. Make sure the video card *and* monitor are not only HDMI/DVI enabled but also HDCP capable so you can play copyright-protected software
2. HDMI-enabled cards don't necessarily carry audio, although HDMI's benefit over DVI *is* audio; I chose this particular Zotac GT 240 card which has all the bells and whistles including integrated 7.1 channel sound through HDMI, is completely silent (fan-less), and supports the latest Fourth Generation PureVideo HD for complete hardware acceleration. First runner up was the Zotac 9600 GT (which is really superseded by the GT 240, plus requires that you plug in a special S/PDIF cable to the motherboard for digital audio), followed by the less performing Zotac 9800 GT.
3. Power requirements and consumption for the video card vis a vis the capacity of your power supply and capabilities of the motherboard is *critical*. Some cards require anywhere from 18A to 24A to 28A to 36A or more of amperage on the +12V rail. The heavier ones get their power from a separate 6-pin PCIe power cable, not the motherboard; I even saw cards with two 6-pin PCIe sockets! The card I chose gets its power exclusively from the motherboard, although my power supply does provide that separate 6-pin PCIe cable - I am just not a gamer to need more power.
4. Don't bother with PowerDVD 8; dump it and buy PowerDVD 9 Ultra only, then update it to the latest build. Do not bother with PowerDVD 10 unless you want to get into 3D video - too new at the moment to be stable. No experience with other software players. Don't bother with Cyberlink's Customer Support; get on avsguide.com's forums which is a goldmine of information.
5. Turn on hardware acceleration in PowerDVD (particularly useful for H.264 and MPEG-4 decoding of blurays)
6. Get a name-brand bluray drive; OEMs are crap
7. I prefer Nvidia-based cards because I can easily control the video card's fan speed - for that, look for a video card with 3 or 4 wires to the fan; two won't do. On the other hand, ATI's Catalyst Control Center also offers fan speed control via the Overclocking (!) menu, but it lets you only select a fixed speed, not variable that a lot of Nvidia cards do; haven't seen an ATI-based card with 3 or 4 wires to the fan, although I didn't look that hard. If you want to go with ATI, a good card to start with is the Radeon 5670, although it sports only two wires to the fan (thus not adjustable and noisy)
8. If you want to successfully configure bluray-ready software player and hardware, start with running Cyberlink's BDAdvisor and looking up the hardware support list. Specific to BDAdvisor, on top of the nice GUI, make sure you save the discovery report (as HTML) and take a look at it - look specifically for RGBOverlay support in the card.
9. Turn off your anti-virus program if discs fail to load or freeze while playing
10. For Nvidia-based chips, there are some cool monitoring and low-level configuration utilities (similar to ATI's recent versions of Catalyst Control Center), such as MSI's Afterburner, EVGA's Precision and RivaTuner - all free and written by the same "dude".

 

[LesAuber]

With regards to item 9 I've found Avira Antivir to be compatible with video playback. I've never tried to get HDCP playback going so can't swear to that aspect. I ran into trouble playing back recorded HDTV transport streams with Norton AV. Even white listing the files didn't help. So far no issues with Antivir and either HDTV files or normal DVD playback. It even has a free version. The free version lacks email scanning, firewalls etc.

Turning off AV completely worked but I really didn't want to run that way continuously on a networked system.

I understand that Grisoft's AVG also works well in this respect.

Of course YMMV.

 

[Jaguar]

I tend to believe that Blu-ray on PC has a way to go. I've been using Power DVD 9 Ultra and rather than a graphics card my motherboard has the the Intel G45 onboard graphics chip. The upscaling feature in Power DVD is one of the coolest things I've run across; it makes standard DVD look really close to high def on some CDs, like my Gilligan's Island collection. Playing Blu-ray has been a problem. It worked fine for several months. I was playing Blu-ray discs and a few high def movies that I ripped to img files. One day it started crashing every time, after playing for 10-20 minutes. Nothing I have tried so far has worked, including updating the drivers, testing the memory, reinstalling the program and stopping the Security Essentials scanner. I have not tried to see if my new Windows installation fixes the problem; I give it a 50/50 chance.

 

[DonH50]

Most everybody I know uses an alternate boot setup to run with minimal stuff when burning/editing. Like in the early days of CD drives in PCs, most systems are awfully taxed trying to record BDs, and Windows sucks as a real-time system for the average user.

I have been told users prefer XP; skip Vista and go to 7, then tweak.

Good luck! - Don

 

[JackD201]

I contemplated BD over PC but got discouraged by the complexity (for me anyway) of the process. I got a BD capable Popcorn Hour with 2TB instead.

 

[Jaguar]

I have found that the crashes I was experiencing with Blu-ray on Power DVD may have been coming from turning off the page file. Try setting it to system managed for the drive with Power DVD and maybe also for the drive with the movie file, if it is a movie file stored on a hard drive.