Bly-Ray PC drive

Drez

Hi all,

So do Blu-Ray burners also serve as players, or no? I'm not explicitly interested in the ability to burn to Blu-Ray discs but if they serve both purposes I will get a burner I guess.

IcyLiquid

H/A?

Fyndir

Drez wrote: »

Hi all,

So do Blu-Ray burners also serve as players, or no? I'm not explicitly interested in the ability to burn to Blu-Ray discs but if they serve both purposes I will get a burner I guess.

I can't imagine anyone creating a burner that couldn't also play the same media, you need that functionality to check that stuff has burned correctly etc.

But I guess it's possible, so I'll say link the specific product you're interested in and I/someone will surely take a look and give a definitive answer if possible.

Donovan Puppyfucker

If someone makes a burner that can't actually read the disc format it can write to, I'll eat a $20 note.

(Our notes are polymer)

Drez

Of course they can read data. But I read that they cannot play movies - though that was in the PC drives' infancy.

Nappuccino

What it might be, is that those drives don't come with the software to read the bluray codec. A lot of the cheap drives, early on, didn't come with that software (or came with really bad software) so they couldn't, out of the box, play bluray movies.

That said, I haven't looked into this in about a year and a half so my knowledge is probably outdated.

bowen

My blu-ray burner has no problem playing movies. I have a memorex.

Drez

Excellent, thanks.

bowen

You might need something like VLC, mine didn't come with that movieviewer suite that they usually do.

a5ehren

Yeah. You'll need to get a player or codec, but the drive itself won't be the problem.

DarkPrimus

As others have said, Windows does not natively support playing Blu-Rays.

But there are tons of free Blu-Ray playing software out there you can get, and you can even get some bundled with the drive you pick up, if you feel so inclined.

Jebus314

DarkPrimus wrote: »

As others have said, Windows does not natively support playing Blu-Rays.

But there are tons of free Blu-Ray playing software out there you can get, and you can even get some bundled with the drive you pick up, if you feel so inclined.

Is there? The last time I looked only powerdvd and Total media theater 5 were capable of playing the blurays. Both are pay for software as far as I know. TMT5 is like $100 or so, and I've heard it is the far superior product.

Maybe the decoders are far more common now. I have no idea. To be clear though, I'm talking about playing bluray movies that you might purchase. I haven't seen any free software that could decode those. You could still burn an mkv/mp4/avi/whatever to a bluray disc and be able to read it from the same bluray drive, but I thought there was only a few software programs that could read standard bluray movies.

Djeet

PotPlayer? Haven't tried it myself, have a PS3 and most BR's I watch have been transcodes.

Drez

Thanks for the info. Food for thought at least.

Essee

I read this and I was thinking "wait a minute, VLC can actually play Blu-rays now, can't it? I'm really sure about this and I think I saw mention of this in release notes once." Turns out it IS true that it can play Blu-rays, but it looks like for certain types you may need to download an additional addon pack to do it. (If you google "VLC Blu-ray" you should be able to find all this info, but I think the downloads are directly available from the bottom of VLC's site anyway.) I can't test how Blu-ray playback works with base VLC because I don't actually have a Blu-ray player in any of my computers (maybe it's built-in now? You should try it that way first to find out), but it looks like doing it with the addon pack, at least, has been an option for many moons now and should let you play everything. So no, nobody has to buy software to play their Blu-rays anymore, actually. Huzzah!

Drez

Awesome, thanks!

Nova_C

Whaaaat? VLC does Blu-Ray now?

I need to check this shit out like right now!

EDIT: Oh, support is dependent on the blu-ray's encryption, so it plays some, not all, blu-rays. It also requires multiple add on installs.

The reason I like VLC is you're not constantly taping bits onto it to get it to play.

My blu-ray player came with PowerDVD, so I'll stick with that.

Drez: Blu-rays require HDCP compliance. Which means your blu-ray drive, video card and possible monitor must all be HDCP compliant. This shouldn't be an issue with hardware that's less than 5 years old, but just a heads up.

Essee

Actually it seems like on Windows you just need a key file and one DLL. I didn't initially link this but I guess I should have anyway. (That is just a more user-friendly version of what you'd get from VLC's own site, by the way, so don't worry! It's a legit site. Also legal.) Note that if you are using the 32-bit version of VLC (I believe most people still are because the 64-bit version is usually not a stable one) you should get the 32-bit DLL, regardless of whether you're on 64-bit or not. I thiiink you don't actually need libbluray anymore, since there IS some degree of Blu-ray support in VLC from reading further. I also think it's not totally experimental at this point, which is good. So, you should just need what I linked. In theory. Can't test this.

(Also, it is conceivably possible that companies have come up with different Blu-ray encryption schemes since that came out, in which case yeah, you're still kind of stuck unfortunately.)

Drez

Nova_C wrote: »

Whaaaat? VLC does Blu-Ray now?

I need to check this shit out like right now!

EDIT: Oh, support is dependent on the blu-ray's encryption, so it plays some, not all, blu-rays. It also requires multiple add on installs.

The reason I like VLC is you're not constantly taping bits onto it to get it to play.

My blu-ray player came with PowerDVD, so I'll stick with that.

Drez: Blu-rays require HDCP compliance. Which means your blu-ray drive, video card and possible monitor must all be HDCP compliant. This shouldn't be an issue with hardware that's less than 5 years old, but just a heads up.

I have a brand new Plasma 3DTV and a GTX 670. That shouldn't be a problem.