The road to Blu-ray on PC?

[pp05]

How many people watch blu-ray movie via disc on their pc?

Was this a simple upgrade or did you find it confusing initially what with all the hdcp marlarkey..

So you need a blu-ray drive.. what else..

[Terbinator]

How many people watch blu-ray movie via disc on their pc?

Was this a simple upgrade or did you find it confusing initially what with all the hdcp marlarkey..

So you need a blu-ray drive.. what else..

HDCP compatible GPU/IGP and a HDCP Monitor and possibly a HDCP sound card if your after the 'HD' soundtracks from the movies.

[pp05]

HDCP compatible GPU/IGP and a HDCP Monitor and possibly a HDCP sound card if your after the 'HD' soundtracks from the movies.

Blimey turb that is a lot of things. Am assuming vista/7 is needed as well..

Aren't all modern gpu hdcp compliant and also.. do they live up to their billing or is all marketing..?

[Terbinator]

Blimey turb that is a lot of things. Am assuming vista/7 is needed as well..

Aren't all modern gpu hdcp compliant and also.. do they live up to their billing or is all marketing..?

I think all GPU's post Nvidia's 6xxx series are HDCP. I don't know what you mean by "living up to their marketing" I mean as far as i know, my GTX 260 will play a Blu-Ray disc provided i had a BD-Drive and it was hooked up to the TV downstairs by either DVI/HDMI - The same goes for the 4200 IGP on my AMD set-up, although the 4200 can provide audio over HDMI as well

[Funkstar]

You only need a trusted path through your graphics and monitor if the title requires it by setting the HDCP flag, providing the player software is working correctly that is.

I don't know if it's the case for all or current versions of PowerDVD, but it certainally used to insist on a HDCP compliant path for all HD titles regardless of the publishers intentions. I don't think Arcsoft Total Media Theatre has this problem.

If it has an HDMI port these days it will be HDCP compliant or if it is marketed as being an HD card or monitor.

[pp05]

I think all GPU's post Nvidia's 6xxx series are HDCP. I don't know what you mean by "living up to their marketing" I mean as far as i know, my GTX 260 will play a Blu-Ray disc provided i had a BD-Drive and it was hooked up to the TV downstairs by either DVI/HDMI - The same goes for the 4200 IGP on my AMD set-up, although the 4200 can provide audio over HDMI as well

I remember the first 'hdcp' cards by ATI being reviewed year or so ago and there blu-ray performance was said to be average. It was more of an afterthought.

So if I wanted to add blu-ray... we talking modern gpu either onboard or new card, monitor hdcp compliant and a dvi cable that allows end-end protection?

[crazyfool]

Yep, most modern gpu's are hdcp compliant (if not all???) and so are the monitors. In terms of actual playback 8400GS and onwards, 3450 and onwards can all handle playback (not sure about earlier cards) however it all comes down to what you want. Newer cards use <5-10% cpu to do it, older models will use more because they use different versions of UVD and Purevideo. The lower end models can play it back fine but you won't be able to use any sharpening or denoising if you wanted to as the gpu would start dropping frames etc... Also just to confuse you a bit more the hardware mentioned in this article can decode h264 and vc1, the codecs used for blu ray, independant of any gpu although you would still need a hdcp compliant gpu it just won't do the decoding.
Oh also if you had hardware which could do the job but wasn't HDCP compliant then anydvdhd could be used to strip the copy protection on the fly although this isn't free.
One more thing is that if you wanted to play blu ray back at 24p then nvidia does a better job of this then ati (unless this has changed???).
Hope all that makes sense.