Blu-ray and HD DVD: Is Your PC Ready for it?
| Blu-ray and HD DVD: Is Your PC Ready for it? | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 By Zachary ChanCategory : DIY Guides  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Introduction You've probably heard of convergence at some point or another by now. It's loosely used to convey the merging of personal computing and digital entertainment with home theater. You may even already have convergence products in your living room, purchased or setup your own HTPC system with networked media streaming throughout your house. The next step is obviously to upgrade and support new generation formats and media. For home entertainment, this would be Blu-ray and HD DVD - the two battling successors of the DVD era and have been hot topics of conversation for the last year at least. These two formats are now available, but are you ready for High Definition (HD)? Getting yourself a set-top box is probably the most straightforward solution for Hi-Fi aficionados, but what about the HTPC brethren? Blu-ray and HD DVD support is not as simple as buying a Blu-ray or HD DVD optical drive. In this guide, we introduce the technology and requirements to get your HTPC 'True HD'-ready.
*Note that the scope of this article is as an elementary guide to setting up a Blu-ray/HD DVD capable PC and not to serve as a technology or performance analysis of HD standards, HD DVD vs. Blu-ray, ATI vs. NVIDIA or Intervideo vs. Cyberlink. HDTV vs True HD By HD, we're not talking about HDTV or the HD clips available on the net such as Quicktime trailers. Users should be aware that there is quite a vast difference between the various types of HD content there is out there, since the word is a general term to define any video source that is encoded higher than 480p (720 x 480 progressive), which is the current NTSC DVD standard. In terms of standards, the two most common HDTV broadcast specifications are delivered in 720p (1280x720 progressive) or 1080i (1920x1080 interlaced) with average bit-rates of 10Mbps. User encoded HD clips or those found on the web can come in various non-standard sizes and bit-rates using the multitudes of CODECs such as Quicktime, WMV, x264, etc. Blu-ray and HD DVD however, is standardized MPEG-4 Part 10 a.k.a. H.264 or AVC and can be delivered up to the full 1080p (1920x1080 progressive) resolution (commonly termed as True HD) with average bit-rates that are twice that of HDTV at 20Mbps and is within specifications to be capable of reaching a whopping 40Mbps. Remember back in the time where PCs required a dedicated MPEG-2 card to properly playback DVD videos? We're at a similar juncture with Blu-ray and HD DVD. While most modern PC hardware, including previous generation GPUs and CPUs can playback HDTV without much problem, there is no GPU or CPU alone that can handle decoding of Blu-ray and HD DVD's H.264 streams in full resolution. *Both Blu-ray and HD DVD have in their capacity to support MPEG-2 and Microsoft's VC-1 formats as well, but we will focus on H.264 hardware acceleration support in this article as it is the most taxing of the three. Hardware Requirements The SetupCPU - Raw Processing Power The very basic requirements are simple, like regular DVD-capable PC, you'll require a Blu-ray or HD DVD optical drive, software capable of playing back Blu-ray or HD DVD movies and a sufficiently powerful CPU/GPU combo with hardware accelerated decoding. Of course, you'll need a monitor capable of actually displaying Blu-ray and HD DVD in full resolution, though that's the least of your worries. The tricky part is in knowing what exactly you need in order to optimize performance and compatibility. The following table is a generic hardware table derived from NVIDIA's own HD recommendation checklist document that details the minimum and recommended CPU specifications needed to properly playback Blu-ray or HD DVD: Blu-ray and HD DVD CPU Requirements.
GPU - Hardware Acceleration Even with today's powerful dual-core CPUs, pure software decoding of Blu-ray and HD DVD is almost impossible and there comes the need for hardware acceleration. Most of today's GPUs from ATI and NVIDIA - the two main competitors in consumer graphics - have some level of video acceleration built into the GPU. ATI's AVIVO is an all-encompassing technology that can be found in any of their latest X1K series or graphics cards or their Theater 550 and 650 series of TV Tuners. Take note however for Radeon X1K graphics cards, not all of them can smoothly handle full HD resolutions of the 1080p standard. Due to the way ATI's graphics processor handle video acceleration within their main graphics pipeline, it is recommended to own at least a fast mid-range or better yet, a high-end ATI graphics card to tackle full HD resolution acceleration fluently. On the other hand, NVIDIA's PureVideo technology is split into two versions. The original PureVideo is available from all GeForce 6 series and above GPUs, and already capable of H.264, WMV, and MPEG-2 hardware acceleration. The newer PureVideo HD standard is a superset extension to the existing PureVideo standard and designed for Blu-ray and HD DVD playback. PureVideo HD is only available on GeForce 7 series and above graphics cards. With both ATI and NVIDIA, enabling AVIVO or PureVideo HD is required through latest set of GPU drivers. NVIDIA specifically used to bundle their PureVideo decoder as a separate software purchase, but is now bundled with the latest ForceWare drivers. Blu-ray and HD DVD GPU Requirements
Note that the GPU specifications are based on recommended scenarios derived from NVIDIA. Actual performance may vary from system to system. For more in-depth and detailed GPU information and specifications, please visit the respective manufacturer's site as it is beyond the scope of this guide. Optical Drives The next thing you'd need is of course a Blu-ray and HD DVD optical drive to playback your discs. As of writing, you'd find it easier to get a Blu-ray drive for the PC instead of HD DVD - discounting the built-in drives from noteboooks and the XBOX 360 console of course, which have been reported not to work on a PC anyway. For a Blu-ray drive/burner, expect to spend around US$700-1000 for some of the initial models out today like the Sony BWU-100A or the LG GBW-H10N. The table below shows the available drive models that are already in the retail channels or going to be launched soon. This list is by no means exhaustive or final, but those we're able to confirm with appropriate model numbers. PC Compatible Blu-ray and HD DVD Optical Drive Table
DRM Limitations - The Sticky Issue Blu-ray and HD DVD discs will feature a new content (read: copy) protection technology called Advanced Access Content System (AACS) based on a broadcast encryption technique. Users do not really have to worry about the intricacies of AACS, but you do need to know about HDCP or High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection. HDCP is a form of DRM for high definition content delivered through DVI or HDMI connections. Because of this, you will need a graphics card that is not only HDCP-capable, but actually includes the necessary HDCP crypto-ROM chip that has the keys required to encode protected HD content. Without HDCP, you can have the best GPU decoder out there and you won't be able to playback your protected Blu-ray or HD DVD discs over DVI/HDMI. Additionally on the receiving-end, which is your monitor or HDTV, these too have to be HDCP compliant to display protected HD content. Up till now, we've only talked about HDCP limiting DVI and HDMI connections, which is true for high-end monitors and TVs, but on a PC, there really isn't any restrictions of you were to say output HD through VGA or even composite cables - for now. HDCP has an additional DRM component called the Image Constraint Token (ICT), which can be used to force downsizing of protected HD 1080p video to SD resolutions (480p/540p) even on analog connections. Luckily, because first generation consumer hardware like HDTVs are non-HDCP compliant, the powers that be have decided to hold the implementation of ICT till the 2009-2012 timeframe, which gives consumers a few years to get themselves fully HDCP compliant. While technically you can still get by for at least the next three years without a HDCP compliant display or graphics card, most NVIDIA and ATI cards today that support H.264 acceleration should already be HDCP-enabled, though users should check with their respective vendors first to be doubly sure. Software Requirements Besides meeting all the hardware requirements to play Blu-ray or HD DVD, you will need capable playback software. While Blu-ray and HD DVD compatible authoring software is available, getting your hands on a player is not as easy. At the present moment, only Cyberlink and Intervideo seems to have developed Blu-ray and HD DVD support into their popular PowerDVD and WinDVD software. Due to the different standards though, both players have separate versions for Blu-ray and HD DVD support. Alternatively, you can probably try Nero ShowTime 3. Checklist To summarize the above, here is a compressed checklist on the basic requirements needed to setup your own Blu-ray or HD DVD capable PC: Since Blu-ray drives are the only ones we could get our hands on, we chose to set up a Blu-ray capable PC for this guide using an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ CPU, NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT and an LG H10N SuperMulti Blue BD Rewriter drive. Sony's latest Bravia KLV-46X200A 1080p LCD TV was used for display. At the time of our tests, we were using the NVIDIA PureVideo HD beta ForceWare drivers 92.91 to enable Blu-ray decoding acceleration. Since then, NVIDIA has released the final ForceWare 93.71 with PureVideo HD. We also managed to receive a copy of PowerDVD 6.6 BD Edition from Cyberlink. After installing PowerDVD, we ran the neat little BD/HD DVD advisor to check up to see if our system is ready to roll. The Cyberlink advisor will check your system and software specs for all the basic requirements and even HDCP availability. In the course of our testing, we found out that without the proper graphics card and drivers, PowerDVD will not play the Blu-ray movie.
Playback
Starting up, we must say that we're not quite impressed with the image quality so hyped about for Blu-ray. The movie played through with very visible noise throughout and even the menus weren't spared. Blown up on a 46-inch 1080p LCD TV, the artifacts are very apparent. We've tried to playback different Blu-ray discs from House of Flying Daggers to Stealth and Ultra Violet, all of them exhibit the same noise and grainy image with visible color compression as well. The quality of a full resolution 1080p Blu-ray movie didn't come close to what we've already been used to with the HD demos we've been fed with, user encoded HD clips or even HDTV broadcast in general. With the many restrictions, limitations and high requirements to build a Blu-ray capable PC, our initial response wasn't favorable to say the least.
However, after digging around the net for a while, it seems that our image quality concerns will be something that early adopters have to live with. This isn't really an issue with Blu-ray or the H.264 standard, but rather poor encoding and compression in early titles in the infancy of this new format. Newer titles have much improved image quality and purely digital titles like Corpse Bride have been reported to be excellent. Final Say High Definition is taking the world by storm, promising greatly increased visual and audio clarity, but as with any new technology, there is a high premium to pay for early adopters. Current generation CPUs and GPUs are all geared up to tackle HD content in general, but if you want to invest in Blu-ray, HD DVD or both, the requirements can be very steep and outside what one would consider a mainstream system. |
CyberLink has a nifty program designed to sniff your your PC hardware and software to determine if it is Blu-ray or HD DVD ready. 
Well what do you know? Ours is. 
If you're familiar with PowerDVD, you'd remember its pretty powerful built-in screencapture capabilities. 
However, once you put in a Blu-ray disc, screen capture is automatically disabled. PowerDVD even takes over and disables your Print Screen button and so far, we've been unable to take a screenshot of a playing BD movie at all - Another 'friendly' digital content protection method. 
HD DVD may not have region codes yet, but Blu-ray does. The good thing though is that it is more compressed and Asia (except China) falls in the same category as the Americas - No more swapping drives! 
Notice the bitrate of a Blu-ray movie and the compression format. 
No Comment
Post a Comment