Madoshi Posted January 25, 2010 Share Posted January 25, 2010 sometime in the near future, i wanna play Blu-ray movies on my laptop :) it is a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2, from about 2005-ish. 2.13GHz Pentium-M (1 core), 2GB DDR2, 256MB GeForce Go 6800 Ultra, 250GB IDE hard drive, 1920x1200 widescreen, Windows 7 Home Premium. installing a Blu-ray drive in place of the existing DVD burner is easy. finding a slimline IDE-interface drive for a low price is quite a bit harder it seems, but they do exist. what the real question is: will my hardware play BDs smoothly? is playback done primarily on the CPU or the GPU? what kind of software should i be looking for? how easy or hard is it to get commercial titles to play? (HDCP?) just want to see if this is feasible. would be probably a month or two before i have extra money to be spending on this sort of thing. my budget would be about $200, maybe $250 for the drive, software, and a movie or two. is this doable? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperHumanly Posted January 25, 2010 Share Posted January 25, 2010 That computer will most likely struggle, especially being a 2.13GHz pentium M single core. I'm running a Intel Core2Duo 2.5GHz, 4GB DDR2 RAM, 320GB HDD and a 512MB GeForce GT130M and sometimes it will struggle to play BluRay media. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roger H. Veteran Posted January 25, 2010 Veteran Share Posted January 25, 2010 Somethings wrong with your PC then. Granted i've NEVER played an actual blu-ray disc on here (no BD drive), 1080p MKVs and WMVs and BDRips (40-50GB downloads!) play fine on my laptop with power to spare. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madoshi Posted January 25, 2010 Author Share Posted January 25, 2010 i might see if i can get ahold of a BD rip if my system really is a just-barely deal, i could drop the OS down to Windows 2000 pretty easily, or XP Media Center 2005 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nw2001 Posted January 25, 2010 Share Posted January 25, 2010 mmm, 2ghz is like the minimum for 720p Playback, From what I remember during my reading back when I was thinking about slapping together a media center, a dual-core was the minimum for 1080p, Specific video cards can help AFAIK, you'll have to read up on that. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=921954 This might help, no clue how accurate it is, but hopefully it helps you. I have 720p running on this weak arse machine running an amd athlon xp 2800, but 1080p makes this thing choke hard, Sound desyncs, intolerable lag. etc, but your computer is newer than mine so maybe you'll have better luck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
protocol7 Posted January 25, 2010 Share Posted January 25, 2010 I don't think your video card would be HDCP-compliant so if the hardware is able to handle BD playback, you'd need to use AnyDVD to defeat the HDCP protection. Cyberlink have a BD advisor you can run. It'll give you some idea of where you stand. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperHumanly Posted January 25, 2010 Share Posted January 25, 2010 Somethings wrong with your PC then. Granted i've NEVER played an actual blu-ray disc on here (no BD drive), 1080p MKVs and WMVs and BDRips (40-50GB downloads!) play fine on my laptop with power to spare. I think it's just VLC being it's usual self. And I wasn't referring to Blu-Ray disks, I play MKV files, 1080p. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Minifig Posted January 25, 2010 Share Posted January 25, 2010 BIG thing here no one is mentioning: Is your monitor on the laptop HDCP Compliant... If not.. you're screwed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
max84 Posted January 25, 2010 Share Posted January 25, 2010 BIG thing here no one is mentioning: Is your monitor on the laptop HDCP Compliant... If not.. you're screwed. If the monitor isn't HDCP compliant, he needs to use AnyDVD HD. In any case PowerDVD is the best way to play Blu-Rays on computers. That's what I use. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madoshi Posted January 25, 2010 Author Share Posted January 25, 2010 (edited) alright, i did some tests under Windows 2000 (yea, i installed it specially for this) and with the latest CCCP, a 20 second 1080P test video of the Fox Searchlight logo lagged too much to be watchable, with CPU usage being stuck at 100%. but a 55 second 720P video of someone playing Crysis played back very well with CPU usage being around 75% throughout. i think i might just get a large hard drive and a slim CD slot adapter instead, and load it with video Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yxz Posted January 25, 2010 Share Posted January 25, 2010 http://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayer-win32/files/MPlayer%20and%20MEncoder/revision%2030369/MPlayer-rtm-svn-30369.7z/download lower cpu usage? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madoshi Posted January 26, 2010 Author Share Posted January 26, 2010 (edited) http://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayer-win32/files/MPlayer%20and%20MEncoder/revision%2030369/MPlayer-rtm-svn-30369.7z/download lower cpu usage? with that it is 98-100% CPU usage but the test video plays very smooth is there a graphical front-end to MPlayer? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yxz Posted January 26, 2010 Share Posted January 26, 2010 This package contains the latest builds of MPlayer for the Windows platform as well as SMPlayer and MPUI.Thanks to the award-winning MPlayer engine, more than 192 Video- and 85 Audiocodecs are supported natively! For maximum performance the package includes optimized MPlayer binaries for various CPU types. Furthermore the Full-Package includes the Binary Codec Package to enable even more audio/video formats. Everything in one self-contained download :-) The Light-Package is a stripped-down version of this package, that includes MPUI and the MPlayer binaries only. http://mulder.dummwiedeutsch.de/home/?page=projects#mplayer http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=138725 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smithy_dll Posted January 26, 2010 Share Posted January 26, 2010 If you want decent battery life, you will want full h.264 decoding acceleration built into the graphics adaptor. Otherwise you will most likely struggle except on the newer core 2 duo laptops (P and T 8xxx, 9xxx). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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