How To Make Your PC Ready for Blu-Ray

How To Make Your PC Ready for Blu-Ray:

Apparently Sony Corporation did learn from it past mistakes. It lost the Beta versus VHS format war, not because its beta product was inferior but because Sony refused to license its technology to other manufacturer’s so they could build hardware for it.  The high-definition video war is over and Blu-ray is the undisputed winner.
Now that the war is over, many PC owners want to add Blu-ray capability to their PCs.  If you are running Windows 7 or Mac OS/X, you are all ready to add Blu-ray since both of those operating systems support Blu-ray.

First Decision

Even if your operating system supports Blu-ray, your hardware may not. The Blu-ray drive uses SATA to connect to your motherboard. The important thing to check is to see if your graphics card and monitor are HDCP compliant. HDCP stands for High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection created by Intel to prevent pirating while the content is dent over DVI or HDMI connections between a source and a receiver.
So if either your graphics (the source) or your monitor (the receiver) fails the HDCP test, you will still get a signal but it won’t be high definition and you will have wasted your money.

Second Decision

If your hardware supports Blu-ray, then your second decision is whether to buy a Blu-ray player or a burner. Players are cheaper but only let your play the disks. Burner will give you the ability to create all varieties of Blu-ray, DVD and CD disks including dual layer disks. With 25GB storage on a single layer disk and 50 GB on a dual layer disk, the storage capacity is inviting. At the moment, single layer disks run around $3 each and dual layer disks around $10 each.

Third Decision

You will also need software to run your Blu-ray player or burner.  Both Windows 7 and the Mac OS/X have built in software capable of Blu-ray playback. However, for burning or ripping, you will most likely want to purchase a commercial application like Cyberlink’s Power DVD Ultra or Nero.

Recommendation

If your hardware supports Blu-ray but your operating system doesn’t, you really should consider upgrading to Windows 7 or Max OS/X. I did read about some tweaked drivers available for Windows XP, but no one seems to be having much luck getting them to work right.