Problems with Blu Ray playback

[strontium_99]

Hi there all,

Sorry for a very noobish question..... again, but I get lost with a lot of the terminology banded about and have decided to go back to basics

Just to explain my setup:
I have an Acre Aspire Revo with Intel Atom 330 1.6 GHz processor, NVidia ION Chipset with Integrated Graphics running Windows 7 64bit with 4 gig of memory witch is connected via HDMI to my Sony KDL-40W5500 TV. I use this as my PVR and to RIP my vast collection of DVDs to hard drive, to keep the wife happy. Less DVD boxes kicking about, you see. Playback on both recorded TV and DVD rips are fine using MCP-HC.

I wanted to step up to HD. It would be nice to play the one Blu Ray disc I currently own, Avatar So to this end I purchased as external eSATA enclosure and a LG (BH10LS30) Blu Ray drive.

My initial question is, should this sort of setup be able to handle Blu Ray playback, putting aside Audio for the time being?

Included in with the Blu Ray drive was a copy of PowerDVD, which I loaded, because I believe it's not possible to play kosher Blu Ray discs using MPC-HC because of the discs protection. Is that true?

Anyhow, play back was ok. The problem I had was on panning shots it seemed to drop frames. I guess a lot of people would put up with this, but it drove me nuts. Plus I wasn't that wild about PowerDVD. Seemed a little bloated.

So thought I would try ripping the Blu Ray to HD and try playing the content using MPC-HC. But I'm still getting frames dropped on panning sequences. I invested in CoreAVC codec which seems to be regard quite well across a lot of the forums. But even setting this as my preferred filter, I'm getting this stutter on playback.

Can anybody offer me some advice please? I don't to go ploughing in there and change setting willy-nilly in MPC-HC because it seem a little heavy duty and I'm not totally sure what I'm doing.... you can tell, can't you

Any help would be great.

Thanks in advance,

Andy.

[Baldrick]

You could also try Splash on the ripped blu-ray.

But I think your cpu is too slow for smooth playback of 1080p blu-ray video.

[jman98]

I am absolutely amazed that you got BluRay to play even as much as it did on your system. Atom CPUs are pretty puny and I would not expect that architecture to do very well with BluRay playback. I do not believe that there is anything you can do to this system to make playback any better, but I admit that I am not an expert with regards to Atom CPUs.

BluRay discs use an encryption and copy protection standard that costs money to license so that's the real reason that MPC-HC can't play them.

PowerDVD is POS compliant in my opinion. I got a free copy too and I think it sucks. It won't play BluRay rips so you need to be aware of that. I ended up buying Arc Soft Total Media Theater because it will play BluRay rips. But again, I think all this info is moot because the bottom line is that as far as I know your system is too underpowered to play BluRays unless someone knows a way for to get a graphics card in there that is able to help you with the playback. I do not know if it's even possible to get such a card for your system.

[strontium_99]

Sorry I did forget to mention it is a Dual core processor.. if that makes any difference. And the NVidia ION graphics is... and I quote from another site "MC79 graphics chip" . Not sure if that's good or bad.

[strontium_99]

Hi there Baldrick, you were spot on. I tried the Splash player and it worked like a dream.
Big thanks all..!!!

Andy.

[jman98]

Hi there Baldrick, you were spot on. I tried the Splash player and it worked like a dream.
Big thanks all..!!!

Andy.

That is good to know. I was not familiar with that player. That's really good that you were able to find a solution that works as I was really concerned that your processor might be too underpowered to do the job. Some processors can't play 1080p video very well with 2 cores without extra help from a graphics card. It's once you get to 3 or more cores that you should have plenty of CPU horsepower to play BluRay video for sure.

[strontium_99]

Thanks dude. I seem to think the NVidia ION integrated graphics card does have some kind of hardware acceleration built in because the Splash player seems to find it and use it, or I suspect you would be right, the processor alone would have no chance. I would recommend checking out the Splash player. Nice little player.

Thanks again,

Andy.