Big PC Geek Tech Blog

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.

I have to say, hearing Hitachi and Toshiba announce a 500GB laptop hard drive is amazing and just impressive but they can’t be used in today’s laptops. Hitachi’s and Toshiba’s just add and additional platter which makes the drive thicker so it won’t fit in most of today’s traditional laptops by adding about 3mm. I don’t think this is the wave of the future but this could be a step to smaller desktop computers and for specialized smaller computer. I could see HP putting this in their super small desktop business and home computer or servers. Not entirely useful but seriously amazing to to see how far we have come. We are probably a year away from seeing standardized 500GB drives in most laptops.

The retail giant Wal-Mart has announced that it will officially stop selling HD DVD in June this year. Among others, Best Buy is also going to feature Blu-Ray in all of their stores. If you have been waiting for the war to end before buying HD DVD or Blu-Ray, I think your safe to buy Blu-Ray.

I just bought a Canon HG10 which is a pretty nice consumer High Definition digital camcorder that records the video onto an internal hard drive.

What I did not think of, which I cant believe but it happens to all of us, is that HD camcorders record in AVCHD format which is ahead of its time right now. AVCHD stands for Advanced Video Codec High Definintion and it is basically a format that most High Def Camcorders have adopted to compress the files. The only problem there is just about no software that will make that video be viewable on your personal computer. As icing on the cake, if your main computer is Vista x64 (64 bit), you are really in trouble.

The Canon came with some junk from Corel that did not give me the options I wanted to edit my video. In fact, it would not even install on my 64 bit machine. I hear the only other option for Canon’s is the Pinnacle Suite but they have not ever been a recommendation by me. Just not what I am looking for. Ideally, I would want Adobe’s Premier Elements to work but it wont. I have heard there may be an update so I will keep looking.

My solution:
Good thing I have a brand new MacBook Pro with iLife 08. iMovie took the video off of my camera with no extra software, it just worked the first time. It looks like Apple’s Final Cut and Final Cut Express will also work. Ok, ok, I now see why the movie industry is still on Macs. So now I will import the movie files from the camcorder onto my mac and then transcode them into a format my 64 bit machine reads and then I can just pick and choose quite a bit of software that will work with the mpeg4 codec for example. I think I will go with Premier Elements 4.

Conclusion:
If you run any Windows X64 machine, forget about AVCHD for now unless you want to do what I do. If you own a 32 bit version of Windows, you might want to use the software your camcorder came with and then transcode the files into something else, and then move it to your favorite movie editing program. If you own a Mac, upgrade to iLife 08 and you should be good. For more advanced techniques, try our Final Cut Express. So what is my point in all this? The computer and software industry is still not ready for AVCHD, if you buy a High Definition Camcorder that uses AVCHD, prepare for your favorite video editor not to work and prepare to do some work to get your movie edited.

I just got word that LG is going to be selling an LCD Wireless TV.

What does this do and why is this so cool? Well lets say you buy a huge TV and want to hang it on the wall and dont want to see all the cables from all the stuff you need to connect to your TV. Well dont connect any to the TV. What is supposed to happen is you are given a box that has all the TV connections and you connect all of your devices to it. The box you keep with all of your peripherals and it will talk to the TV and send the proper signals to the TV.

This is very cool but as we know from WiFi and cell phones, wireless connections dont always work 100% of the time. I am very interested to seeing what happens to this.