Playback
HD-DVD’s and DVD’s use digital compression to squeeze a movie onto a disc. DVD’s use Mpeg-2 for compression, HD-DVD and Blu-ray use the newer and more efficient H.264 and VC-1 codec’s. In order to watch HD films on your PC you’ll need the software to decode these two new codec’s as well as a pretty powerful machine to decode all that data. I think my current PC is more than capable, but we’ll see.
For this write up I will be using Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra, which costs about £50 and supports both HD-DVD and Blu-ray. I should state that you need to have the drive fully installed before installing PowerDVD, otherwise the installer will install the program without HD functionality as it cannot see a HD Drive on your system. Now let’s take a quick look at some commonly quoted specs, which you will need to decode HD content.
Pentium or Athlon 64 CPU clocked at 2GHz and above. CPU muscle is a must. As for graphics power, a nVidia Geforce 6600GT or ATI X1600 is required as minimum as the latest graphics cards have hardware acceleration that can make a world of difference by taking most of the processing tasks away from your CPU. For this reason obtaining the latest graphics card drivers - Forceware for nVidia owners and Catalyst for ATI owners is essential as they will contain improvements to their video decoding hardware.
Copy Protection and HDCP
This is where things get complicated, to the point where I get confused. To watch HD content you will require a monitor or graphics card with HDCP (High bandwidth Digital Content Protection). With me so far? The reason why you’ll require HDCP hardware is because of an ICT (Image Constraint Token) content protection flag which discs are meant to carry but movie studios haven’t added this to any of their films yet, and apparently won’t be until 2010. Good news on that front!
This is where I encountered problems with PowerDVD Ultra. First of my twin 19" Widescreen TFT’s are connected via DVI and not VGA, after all DVI is far superior. Yet PowerDVD refused to play ball and gave me a garbled picture before sprouting out an error within seconds of playing back a movie. So I did a test. I connected one screen with a VGA cable, and the other remained connected with DVI. PowerDVD was happy now and happily played back HD content over analogue VGA.
My next move was to drag the PowerDVD window over to the right onto the screen that was connected via DVI. The moment I did this, the application threw up a wobbly and stopped playing right away as expected. See? VGA is still extremely useful even in this day and age.
I couldn’t take any screen captures no matter what I tried. I put this down to various copyright copy protection systems as I recall some people coming up with ingenious ways of copying HD movies back during its infancy. So I’m afraid I cannot show any screen caps of The Fast and The Furious, which I was using for playback. I had rather odd results with nVidia PureVideo though and I am not sure why. Why I had high CPU hits while playing back two films I cannot understand yet.
Final Comments
On the whole I had no glitches or frame rate problems, just very smooth playback and the video quality looked and sounded superb at a desktop resolution of 1280×720, or 1440×900. The overlay window on PowerDVD showed that the VC-1 codec was in use, and that the audio bitrate was at 1.5Mbps in comparison to DVD’s audio bitrate of 448Kbps.
So, to finish things off as long as you have a fast processor and a half decent DirectX 9 or 10 graphics card, you can easily enjoy HD content on your PC with a simple £120-130 HD-DVD drive add-on, and PowerDVD for £50. Proper stand alone DVD players are coming down in price, but rather slowly at present and they are also way too large. Now all I need are a load of films to buy.
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