We decided to get this drive for our home theatre PC and I'm very pleased with our decision over a standalone player. It came bundled with CyberLink DVD Ultra that worked fine out of the box. We only have a 720P projector but still the picture is fantastic. I'm not crazy about the CyberLink UI but it works fine and every hotkey can be mapped to our Logitech Harmony 1000 remote through an IR keyboard interface I already had, so for the most part it integrates nicely.
We've only viewed a whopping 3 HD movies so far (Rush Hour 3 and Stealth in Blu-Ray and Under Siege in HDDVD). The Blu-Ray movies seem to be recognized a tad faster than HDDVDs but the difference is negligible. Although I'm sure the mastering of "Under Siege" wasn't as well done as many other HDDVDs, there was a marked difference in quality between it and the two Blu-Ray movies that were absolutely crystal clear.
The drive performed flawlessly and the software worked without a hitch with Vista 64bit on an Asus Crosshair motherboard (using the built-in SPDIF out at 24bit/48kHz) with an Athlon64 FX-62 @ 3GHz and 4GB PC6400 RAM. When playing a movie, the CPU (both cores) show between 15% to 25% usage. The computer is in a project recording studio in the other half of the room so it is far enough away that fan noise isn't an issue.
Both DTS and Dolby soundtracks were pumped out the SPDIF port (ADI 1988B SupremeFX) and recognized by the receiver without any problems. The Crosshair motherboard provides both coaxial (RCA) and optical outputs but I used the coaxial output and a high quality audio cable because the computer is so far away from the receiver.
Surround did not work properly though until I patched the software installed from the included CD with a free patch available from the Cyberlink website. No bigee.
The only hitch was that the 8600GT does not support HDCP but movies will play just fine if you are using the analog VGA or HDTV dongle (component). Our projector only has VGA and Component inputs anyway so it didn't matter. When we upgrade to a true 1080P projector we'll have to change the videocard though. The component output will go as high as 1080i but the cables are long enough that it would be a bit blurry at that resolution even though they are very high quality. You can only squeeze so much from an analog signal!
One small annoyance is that because the drive is on a "dual duty" PC with standard LCD monitors (used in the aforementioned recording studio) it opens up on monitor 1 so you have to drag the window over to the HDTV (projector) display before it will allow you to play a Blu-Ray or HDDVD movie. I may figure out a way to force the CyberLink window to open on monitor 3 (the HDTV monitor) but for now it's a small annoyance and only needs to be done once.
So all that to say if you've been looking at this drive, you won't be disappointed! And although my wife and I are both Blu-Ray fans and will be buying/renting Blu-Ray format whenever possible, it's still nice to have the option to watch HDDVDs when the Blu-Ray version is not available.
Just don't use it on an 8 year old P3 500 rig with 256MB of RAM
We've only viewed a whopping 3 HD movies so far (Rush Hour 3 and Stealth in Blu-Ray and Under Siege in HDDVD). The Blu-Ray movies seem to be recognized a tad faster than HDDVDs but the difference is negligible. Although I'm sure the mastering of "Under Siege" wasn't as well done as many other HDDVDs, there was a marked difference in quality between it and the two Blu-Ray movies that were absolutely crystal clear.
The drive performed flawlessly and the software worked without a hitch with Vista 64bit on an Asus Crosshair motherboard (using the built-in SPDIF out at 24bit/48kHz) with an Athlon64 FX-62 @ 3GHz and 4GB PC6400 RAM. When playing a movie, the CPU (both cores) show between 15% to 25% usage. The computer is in a project recording studio in the other half of the room so it is far enough away that fan noise isn't an issue.
Both DTS and Dolby soundtracks were pumped out the SPDIF port (ADI 1988B SupremeFX) and recognized by the receiver without any problems. The Crosshair motherboard provides both coaxial (RCA) and optical outputs but I used the coaxial output and a high quality audio cable because the computer is so far away from the receiver.
Surround did not work properly though until I patched the software installed from the included CD with a free patch available from the Cyberlink website. No bigee.
The only hitch was that the 8600GT does not support HDCP but movies will play just fine if you are using the analog VGA or HDTV dongle (component). Our projector only has VGA and Component inputs anyway so it didn't matter. When we upgrade to a true 1080P projector we'll have to change the videocard though. The component output will go as high as 1080i but the cables are long enough that it would be a bit blurry at that resolution even though they are very high quality. You can only squeeze so much from an analog signal!
One small annoyance is that because the drive is on a "dual duty" PC with standard LCD monitors (used in the aforementioned recording studio) it opens up on monitor 1 so you have to drag the window over to the HDTV (projector) display before it will allow you to play a Blu-Ray or HDDVD movie. I may figure out a way to force the CyberLink window to open on monitor 3 (the HDTV monitor) but for now it's a small annoyance and only needs to be done once.
So all that to say if you've been looking at this drive, you won't be disappointed! And although my wife and I are both Blu-Ray fans and will be buying/renting Blu-Ray format whenever possible, it's still nice to have the option to watch HDDVDs when the Blu-Ray version is not available.
Just don't use it on an 8 year old P3 500 rig with 256MB of RAM
