I recently purchased a Blu-Ray Player not for my home theater system but for my computer and there are some things people should know before they try to tackle adding Blu-Ray to players to their computer. Luckily, I had been planning this so I was not as unprepared as some might be.
First HDCP which stands for High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection and it is the new wave of copy protection added to Blu-Ray movie discs. The key to remember is that all devices in your computer that a Blu-Ray movie’s data will transfer through needs to be HDCP compliant or the movie won’t play. This means the Blu-Ray drive need to have HDCP but that should be included in all Blu-Ray players, your video card must be HDCP compliant, and finally your monitor must be HDCP compliant. If you have a computer with none of this, it can be very costly to add a Blu-Ray player and it might be cheaper to get a dedicated player for your TV. One last part you will need is software to play it on like Power DVD Blu-Ray edition which may be included with your Rom drive.
Seriously, this copyright junk really makes life miserable for honest people but it is necessary given all the people who steal movies and music over the Internet. HDCP is no joke, I have an nvidia 8800 GTS which is a high end HDCP compliant. To test HDCP, I connected my 8800 to two monitors, one HDCP compliant, and one not. I decided to move a playing Blu-Ray movie between the HDCP compliant monitor over to the non-compliant and as soon as I moved the window, it stopped playing and threw an error message at me. No exceptions, HDCP needs the Blu-Ray player, special video card, special monitor, and Blu-Ray player software. There is a possibility that there is some other HDCP compliant hardware that may be necessary which I have and have not heard of. This was tested on Windows Vista, I have no clue if XP will support Blu-Ray even with compliant hardware.
Everything I say goes for Windows computers only, all of you Mac people have to wait till Apple decides to add the functionality.
August 29th, 2008 at 2:19 am
“Seriously, this copyright junk really makes life miserable for honest people but it is necessary given all the people who steal movies and music over the Internet.”
I humbly disagree with the second part of your sentence. I would say that the vast majority of people who want to watch blu-ray on their home computers (outside the market of people who buy ridiculously overpriced high-end brand-name PC’s) are honest people who are not interested in stealing movies. Blu-ray movies are going to get ripped and file-shared regardless; so the software restrictions will only hurt people who are honest. If you download a blu-ray rip off the internet, you don’t need an hdcp video card, monitor and blu-ray drive to play it. It’s probably already in a format that will play fine on an appropriately fast computer.
If you want to watch blu-ray legitimately though, like me, the DRM is a huge hassle. I happen to LIKE my 24″ lcd and the idea of being able to watch blu-ray with dts out to my receiver on a $150 blu-ray drive sounds great, until you get to the part of needing an hdcp video card, an hdcp monitor, and the appropriate decoding software. That is just plain ridiculous. I am willing to pay a fair amount for the software, provided it works with my setup and doesn’t crash. I am NOT willing to buy a new monitor and new video card because of DRM. What is the incentive for me to go the legit way when I can download off the Internet? Keep in mind that even if I buy a blu-ray drive, buy the movies I want to watch, but download a version through P2P, I could still be prosecuted. That’s just plain ridiculous.