While HDTVs seem to be the only kind of TVs selling in electronic shops these days, consumer Blu-ray players seem to be a little less readily available in the market. Those that are available are also either too expensive or have very long wait times to launch after you pop in a disc.
So how do you go Blu if you want to?
One possibility is if you already own relatively modern PC, you can go out and buy a Blu-ray optical drive, which get you into the world of high-definition pretty quick.
While there aren’t that many out in the market right now, you can actually find a Blu-ray drive if you look hard enough.
Recently, Asus sent us the BC-1205PT, which is a combo drive similar to the original DVD combo drives in the sense that it will read but not burn Blu-ray discs, although it will burn CD-Rs and DVD-Rs.
Installation
Installation of the Asus BC-1205PT was pretty straightforward — it’s a SATA-only drive, and plugs right into the SATA port of any modern PC with no problems. Windows Vista recognised the drive and automatically installed the proper drivers for it.
Unfortunately, our review unit (which we assume is a full retail version since it came with a box and all contents) did not come with any Blu-ray playback software.
In case you don’t already know, Blu-ray movie playback involves a lot more than installing a drive — you need the graphics card, the monitor as well as the playback software to support the Blu-ray standard’s copy-protection feature (called HDCP or High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection) which needs to be hard-coded into the hardware.
I had no problems with my ATI HD2900XT card and Dell 2407WFP monitor, both of which fully support HDCP. Most new graphics cards support HDCP, but not all monitors do yet, so it’s best to make sure before you buy.
Performance
Currently CyberLink’s PowerDVD 7 is one of the few applications that support Blu-ray playback, but it’s payware that will set you back more than a hundred ringgit, depending on the version.
Having said that, once you have compliant hardware and software to play BD movies, getting a Blu-ray movie to play on the PC is actually a lot more straightforward than it sounds.
Considering that the BC-1205PT only reads Blu-ray discs and doesn’t burn them I would have thought that at the very least Asus would have included some kind of software to playback Blu-ray movies out of the box.
In any case, playback was pretty much standard after completing the setup — I tried BD copies of The Fifth Element, Blade Runner: The Final Cut and 300 and they all played okay. I found the spin-up times from initial click to actually starting the movie to be quite acceptable.
The only problem I had was some skipping on Blade Runner: The Final Cut but I think this was due to the disc more than anything since I had the same issues with the same disc played on another BD drive I tested.
Blu-ray aside, the BC-1205PT is not a particularly fast burner for the other formats — DVD-R burns at a maximum of only 12x and only 6x for DVD-RW, which is short of the up to 20x and 8x speeds of modern drives.
ASUS BC-1205PT Internal BD reader/DVD-R/CD-R combo drive
Read Speed: 5x BD-ROM/R/RE, 12x DVD-ROM, 8x DVD-ROM (dual-layer), 5x DVD-RAM, 32x CD-ROM
Write speed: 12x DVD-R, 6x DVD-RW, 24x CD-R, 24x CD-RW, 5x DVD-RAM
Software bundle: None
Other features: Burn Proof, 4MB data buffer
Dimensions (w x h x d): 14.8 x 18.5 x 4.23cm
Weight: 980kg
Popularity: 6% [?]
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