Alright, well Blue-Ray drives have come down a lot in price. I can pick up a Blue-Ray burner off Newegg for about $200, so I think I'm going to.

HOWEVER, having read a lot of reviews, it seems as if it isn't a simple case of plugging it in and watching HD movies. A lot of people seem to have trouble with the included "Blue-Ray DVD Software" and drivers and their graphics cards not supporting stuff blah blah blah.

What do I need to know before I purchase this drive? I have CyberLink PowerDVD 7 - does that support BlueRay? Will my 6800GT support it? (I know it can play 1080 video, just wondering if there's something it lacks? It all seems very confusing.

Wouldn't you need one of those fancy HD compatible cards? If your card is compatible it would say so on the description, something along the lines of "Watch movies in stunning HD with Avivio HD or some other random fancy brand-named crap!"

Not sure about PowerDoovde, I've only used it for DVD's myself as I'm more than happy with the quality provided.

Nah it'll be fine.

The "bad" side to Blu-Ray is HDCP (HD Copy Protection) - it may well not play if your monitor is VGA, as it needs DVI or HDMI to output because it needs to do a HDCP handshake (supposed to prevent piracy, but frankly It's failed.

Quote from Jakg :

Nah it'll be fine.

The "bad" side to Blu-Ray is HDCP (HD Copy Protection) - it may well not play if your monitor is VGA, as it needs DVI or HDMI to output because it needs to do a HDCP handshake (supposed to prevent piracy, but frankly It's failed.

Uhmmm... our monitor IS a VGA projector, lol. Is that going to be a problem too? That's absolutely ridiculous.

Rediculous, but that's anti-piracy (it's to stop you ripping them by making a fake software monitor recorder thingy... but it fails. massively).

It also means you can't output to a TV AND to your main monitor simultaneously

FWIW you can play back HD content just fine - it's just HDCP in Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) thats being the issue.

FWIW I got to see my first "proper" use of a Blu-Ray 1080p DVD hooked up to a 42" LG (yeah I know) 1080P TV... and I wasn't that impressed tbh. It still looks like the ISO is a bit ****ed (esp when looking at water) - although I will admit the detail and clarity is nice, watching a film on DVD straight after barely looked that much different from the sofa (although about 2 feet away you could see it was a bit blurry-er. All this just makes me want to track down and ol' 36" CRT Sony ultra-high-end TV even more (because for SD CRT's still look better than LCD's and HD still hasn't impressed me much).

Ok, so basically am I NOT going to be able to plad Blue-Ray movies WITHOUT buying a new HDMI-capable TV or projector? If so, then I can totally understand how Blue-Ray hasn't caught on as fast as they hoped. That's really stupid.

Or is there a way to still play it.

HDCP overview.

It looks like you can get a device called an "HDFury" (link here but ones on eBay are Buy-It-Nows at £20 which takes the DVI output and then just pretends to be a monitor, then outputs the ACTUAL data to VGA - which makes the actual protection ****ing useless!

TLDR - Get an HDFury.

EDIT - HDCP can be bypassed (for educational reasons, I assume...) using AnyDVDHD, apparently.

Quote from Stang70Fastback :

Or is there a way to still play it.

Buy the movie, throw the disc away and then download a HD rip of it off the internet and burn that to a DVD :P

Quote from Kegetys :

Buy the movie, throw the disc away and then download a HD rip of it off the internet and burn that to a DVD :P

Yea, lol. There's a solution. Honestly, I don't see all this encryption stuff lasting very long. They're going to learn soon enough that people are always going to get around it - or fight it. I mean, look at the now DRM-Free iTunes.

I have a blu-ray player (not a writer though) in my computer, and it works fine with powerdvd 8, and with my monitor connected through a regular DVI cable. Hope that helps.

DVI (and HDMI, which is DVI + Sound) support HDCP - thus they work fine.

VGA, however, doesn't.

HDFury is the only solution I could find...