AVCHD disc playback on a PC using PowerDVD 7 Ultra

Laurence wrote on 1/8/2008, 10:53 PM

This is kind of cool if your CPU and graphics card are up to it:

I just installed Cyberlink PowerDVD 7 Ultra which will playback both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs if you have the appropriate disc drive. What is really cool though, is that it will also playback Blu-ray compatible AVCHD discs from a regular DVD drive. CPU usage is pretty high even on a quick dual core machine, but it does use hardware acceleration from your graphics card and on my laptop, playback is pretty smooth.

What this means to me is that I can burn up to about an hour of HDV quality material on a cheap disc from my laptop that will not only preview nicely from the laptop, but will play back on almost all Blu-ray players (not Samsungs unfortunately) beautifully, menus and all!

Yeah it is only 15mbps, but boy does it look good!

Comments

Xander wrote on 1/9/2008, 2:02 AM

I have both PowerDVD 7 and Nero Showtime, but have to use Nero Showtime to view discs I author as PowerDVD prevents me from viewing any HD DVD, AVCHD or Blu rays due to not having an HDCP video card or monitor. These restrictions are quite ludicrous when I can view the Vegas rendered .m2ts/.m2t in PowerDVD, but stick it on a high def format disc and sorry, you are not allowed to view it.

farss wrote on 1/9/2008, 2:38 AM

Good to see at least Nero aren't trying to stop us from watching our own content. This whole HDCP/HDMI thing is a mess that's going to get worse before it gets sorted and we're paying for the cost of it.

Bob.

4eyes wrote on 1/9/2008, 4:02 AM

Laurence,
Did you buy the retail box or the download version.
I have an ATI HD2600XT-Pro Pci-e video card in a Q6600 computer. I did have an Nvidia 8600GTS pro (the good one) in the computer but had problems playing back HD video properly to a HDTV connected as secondary monitor (or even primary monitor). The ATI card performs much better for the HDTV, computer playback on the Nvidia wasn't a problem.

For file playback of the Vegas 15Mbs avc/h264 cpu usage is usually 1% with hardware acceleration & hardware de-interlacing on. WMP 11 also uses the codec quite nicely which then in uses the hardware acceleration. Even with Hardware acceleration off cpu averages about 25% or higher, same with Nero 4 Showtime.
PowerDvd is using the ATI AVIVO acceleration on the ATI video card. Many times I may have to turn off Hardware acceleration for certain files, haven't figured out why yet, the program will just display a blank screen while still playing the audio.

Laurence wrote on 1/9/2008, 5:31 AM

I got the downloadable version with the discount from upgrading from an older version of PowerDVD. My PC is an HP notebook with an ATI graphics card with 256 meg of RAM. The CPU is a 2.2 gigahertz Intel Centrino Core2Duo.

rtbond wrote on 1/9/2008, 10:47 AM

>but will play back on almost all Blu-ray players
>(not Samsungs unfortunately) beautifully,

For the record, the Samsung BD-P1200 Blu-Ray disc player will play back a menu-less, AVC-encoded, BDMV-formatted DVD+R disc and DVD+R DL disc. I have never tried a menu-based BDMV.

--Rob