Was my AnyDVD HD purchase a mistake?

[mobileh264]

Thanks for the many replies this post has generated.

My system specs:
3.0 GHz Pentium 4
nVidia 6800GT
2GB RAM
LiteOn BluRay player DH-4O1S-11
Bundled Software PowerDVD 7.3 BD Edition. (Supposedly equivalent to ultra edition except it only allows you stereo sound)

I have also tried the evaluation version of ArcSoft Total Media. (Anyone proven this product works? I got about 10 seconds of sound out of this for Simpsons Movie, haven't tried with any others yet).

I can't believe this system is not enough horse power to play a high def movie, and if it were lacking I would still expect to see some form of choppy picture displayed. (Can still play recent games like Call of Duty on it at HD resolution and acceptable frame rate).

I've tried to get HD playback for blu-ray using a Pentium 4 3.4 GHz. No chance! These CPUs in their day were famous for their grunt, but nowadays they are very tardy when it comes to exectuing SSE2 instructions and they are actually pretty useless for Blu-ray. The latest Core 2 Duo processors,. not only being dual core can run SSE instructions in a single clock cycle. Clock for clock, they are four-five times more efficient than an old P4 for HD decoding, eg my C2D at 2.66 can do Blu-ray H264/trueHD at 75 percent CPU, with no GPU acceleration. My P4 3.4 can barely play MPEG2/DD.

Without GPU acceleration, the fastest P4, even overclocked to 4GHz+ will hit 100 percent cpu on anything other than MPEG2 blu-ray playback. VC1 and H264 will flood it to death
And that's without HD audio such as trueHD to consider!

Is your system AGP? If it is then you have one last chance to make this rig play Blu-Ray - a Radeon HD2600 AGP version. This card has the Radeon UVD (unified video decoder) onboard, which will do all the decoding of BLu-ray for you. All your CPU has to do is decrypt the aacs and decode the audio.

If you have PCI-16 graphics slot, you can also choose a modern N-vidia such as an 8600. This also does nearly all the video decoding for you on Blu-ray movies. Be aware that high end graphics cards rarely provide more GPU acceleration than low-end ones, as they are targeted at gamers and not HTPC. Don't imagine, for instance, that an 8800 will be better than a 8500 for blu-ray.

It may be worth a try.

 

[Mungquack]

Simpsons DVD

I had a problem with my Winbook display being HDCP compliant. AnyDVD still went through and removed region code and HDCP; however, until the BD+ is cracked you won't be able to watch this movie if you are connected using a DVI connection. You could use a HDMI connection. I have a Lite-On as well and it worked just fine. I am also using a NVIDIA graphics card that is geared to playing Blu-Ray discs. Unfortunately, when I first updated my Pentium 4 computer I bought a ATI FireMV thinking that all I needed to do was get over that 256MB in order to process the movies...this is a major no-no. That card is now sitting in the box it came in under a shelf. :doh:

Now, some of you may think why did I every buy that card? I needed a low-profile...grrr...I am now using the Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS on my Pentium 4 Powerspec MCE 340 computer and everything runs like a champ! Heck...I am even running Vista.

There is another alternative if you do not have the HDMI connection and that is to use an adapter called HDFury. I must warn you that even though they say the quality is great and runs in 1080p...it is still not as good as DVI at 1080P...maybe because it is running through a RGB adapter. It does work though. I bought the DVD for my wife for Valentines day and I had to figure out the solution quick. Now I can rest easy because she got her Spider-Pig fix. LOL

 

[oddy]

Finally got something to play back

Thanks for all the comments. Well I have still had no luck playing anything back direct from the BluRay disk with anyDVD installed. I accept all the comments about needing more horse power but still expected to see something.

However, I tried using AnyDVD to rip The Fifth Element movie to my harddrive and play it from there, and guess what, it works! I used ArcSoft eval to play it.

Yeah the CPU sits at 100% permanently, and it drops lots of frames, but at least I got a result. I just wanted to verify that AnyDVD would allow me to watch stuff without a HDCP setup. I'm not happy that a lot of movies are not supported (BD+) by AnyDVD, as there is no mention of this on the homepage- it gives the impression that you can play any BluRay movie without a HDCP setup.

Well I will sit on the fence a little longer and continue watching DVD's before upgrading my PC. I definately will not be updating my Pioneer plasma however to support this crappy HDCP. So hopefully the software players will become more mature and Slysoft is able to come up with a solution for HD+. Meanwhile my purchase of the AnyDVD HD upgrade is of no use to me... hopefully it is at least paying for some research and development to vanquish these copy protection schemes that don't stop the dishonest and only make life difficult for the honest consumer!

 

[Adbear]

It does support BD+ discs, it can still remove the AACS encryption it just doesn't remove the BD+ part so you can only watch copies on a PC.

 

[SamuriHL]

...and only with an older version of PowerDVD.

 

[4star]

you need to run powerdvd 10

run powerdvd 10 10.0.2113.51, do not update this software as the update contains the code to look for protections. I have 1000 movies +. Use mpclassic 32bit to watch your movies after they are compressed. use powerdvd 10 and the enulator software that slysoft has to mount iso images to play through powerdvd10. Works great and still does..........

 

[Adbear]

You've replied to a post over 4 years old, these days you can use even the latest version of PDVD with AnyDVD HD so there's no need to limit yourself to using earlier versions of PDVD 10

 

[SamuriHL]

Let's not dredge up old resolved threads. Closed.