Add Blu-Ray and HD Sound to your Media Centre for around £200.00....Theoretically?
Hi,
Just noticed that Pioneer are now offering a DVD Rewriter with Blu-Ray reading capabilities. If you have an existing media centre PC with 5.1 or 7.1 analogue outputs running to your 5.1 channel inputs on your receiver, for around £200.00, which includes a copy of PowerDVD 7 Ultra, you can enjoy HD movies and HD sound, theoretically :-)
More details here:
http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/products/main_112_ENU.html @ $99.00 US - supports Dolby Digital Plus and True HD as well as traditional Dolby and DTS variants.
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=625331 @ £136.00 inc VAT
Cheers,
GR.
Yep you are going to need one mother of a PC to run it well.
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Hi,
Well I have taken the plunge and ordered the above bits to add to my PC in the lounge:
AMD x2 Dual Core Processor
2 GB RAM
ATI X1950 Pro 512 MB HDCP Enabled
320 GB HDD
Creative Audigy 2 ZS with analogue outputs.
Hopefully these will be sufficient to run the HD Movies and HD sound.
The Audigy 2 ZS is a very capable soundcard, but doesn't have the decoders for the new HD sound formats, unless its been updated since I bought it.
Saying that, I dont know how a blu-ray or HD dvd IDE will pass the sound to the soundcard, as I havent seen one in the flesh yet.
Hi,
I am hoping/presuming that the decoding is done via the audio codecs that come with the PowerDVD software rather than those native to the card itself. These would then go to the 5.1 Analogue Outputs of the soundcard, much in the same way that some mid-tier HD players have both HDMI 1.3 and 5.1 channel analogue out, with HD audio being fed to the latter.
These are then linked into the 5.1 ch analogue inputs on a suitable receiver thus providing the 5.1 amplified audio.
Worse case scenario is that I can now watch Blu-Ray movies withou the HD audio and without spending at least £300.00 on an old standalone player of £400.00 on a PS3.
Regards,
Rob Knight.
You will need a VERY capable machine with an equally capable soundcard to do that, as I told my dad when he mentioned this little news nugget to me a few weeks back.