PowerDVD capabilities

[sploo]

I got a copy of PowerDVD 7.3 Ultra when I picked up a Blu-ray drive a while back. This has been playing movies without any problems, until recently when I noticed that a new film I bought (Iron Man) was only giving me two channel sound.

Because my receiver is old (no HDMI) I'm running the sound from the PC to the AVR via SPDIF (for DVD DTS/Dolby) and multichannel analog for the high def audio formats.

PowerDVD identifies itself as "PowerDVD BD+HD 2CH", but doesn't appear to have any problems decoding and outputting surround from DVD (SPDIF/analog), or BD movies using LPCM and DTS-HD Master (analog).

However, in the UK, there are now some discs coming out (like Iron Man) whose only English language track is Dolby TrueHD, and it seems to be this format that's causing the problem. I tried Spiderman 3 (which has both LPCM and TrueHD tracks) - the LPCM is fine, but PowerDVD reports the TrueHD track as 2.0.

I'd be happy to upgrade PowerDVD to the latest version, but could someone confirm that version 8 will play TrueHD tracks out to analog in surround?

Also, I've heard a rumour that the latest version(s) of PowerDVD won't play BD ISO images from a virtual drive. I find this very useful (make an ISO using AnyDVD HD) and serve movies without having to mess about with my discs. Anyone know if this is true?

 

[OttoMatic]

Hi there,

I don't know the answer to your question. However, I have a question for you -- what PC are you using? Specifically, I'm interested in RAM, processor speed and video card. I've been using PowerDVD with DVDs only for years, but would like to upgrade to BluRay on PC. I'm wondering if I really need to meet the minimum requirements that PowerDVD specifies, or can I get away with a little less processing speed (RAM and video card would be OK).

Thanks!

 

[sploo]

Hi Otto,

The box is a HTPC I put together with a Q6600 CPU, 2GB RAM and an ATI4850 gfx card.

PowerDVD can use the AVIVO hardware acceleration in the gfx card, and when playing a Blu-ray discs the CPU usage is around 3-4%. So, I suspect you could get away with a much lower power CPU (and it wouldn't surprise me if the video hardware acceleration had similar processing power in a cheaper ATI card).

If I recall correctly, CPU usage is around 40% when not using the acceleration.

Hope that helps.

 

[OttoMatic]

Thanks very much for that info!