Experiments in HD

["Mal Lansell" <mal@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've been trying to get HD-DVD movies playing on my PC, with the
ultimate goal of making them streamable from a server, the same as I
(and many others here) already do with DVDs and other video sources.

I finally managed to get it working, using the Xbox360 HD-DVD drive,
so I thought I'd share in case anyone else wanted to give it a go.

An unsurprising but irritating discovery was that the
"unbreakable"
DRM system did not prevent me from copying and playing an HD-DVD
from the networked hard drive but it did prevent me from playing the
original paid-for disk :-(  No wonder people turn to downloads!

Anyway, here's what I did:

PC:
Core2Duo @ 2.13GHz,
2Gb RAM,
MSI Fanless GeForce 7300GS with DVI, HDMI and HDCP.
Xbox360 HD-DVD Drive.
Monitor:
Asus MW221 22" 1920x1050 with HDCP.

The Xbox360 drive just plugs into a USB port on the PC, and is
recognised as a Toshiba HD-DVD drive.  A modified driver can easily
be found with a quick Google.

Windows will also attempt to install drivers for two memory devices
in the drive - I don't know what they are, and I don't have drivers
for them but they don't seem to be necessary.  I just cancelled the
install.  The drive appears as a DVD-ROM in Explorer, and you can
freely browse the disk contents.

For playback, I bought PowerDVD Ultra.
http://www.cyberlink.com/multi/products/main_112_ENU.html

For testing I used the HD-DVD of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
PowerDVD was able to play the intro sequences directly from the
Xbox360 drive (interestingly, despite having a UK rating on the
case, the copyright warnings and rating screen in the movie itself
were American).  However, playback stopped when the main feature
started - a dialog warning that the card/monitor combination were
not HDCP compliant.  This is not true.  Both support HDCP.

To get round the HDCP issue, I used a program called BackupHDDVD to
decrypt the disk and copy the contents to the hard disk.

BackupHDDVD requires you to enter the volume key for the disk (these
have been discovered for practically every title out there, and can
easily be found on the web).  It does not include any checking for
whether the key is correct, but HD-DVD menus (which are ripped
first) contain .png images - if you can view them, then the key must
be correct.

Ripping took around an hour, the movie requiring ~25Gb of disk space.

PowerDVD was able to play the movie from the hard drive without any
problems.  However, the graphics card could not keep up, and
playback was a bit jerky.  When I turned off the
hardware "acceleration", playback was very smooth.  The Core2Duo
handled it without breaking a sweat - the CPU load went up from
around 30% to 50%, with the temperature staying at 35C, so there is
plenty of headroom for more demanding scenes.  This CPU runs so cool
that apparently it can be overclocked to 3GHz without problems if
need be.  The image quality of course was outstanding.  I even saw
things in the background that I hadn't noticed before.

Conclusions:
A big middle finger to the DRM supporters, and a friendly wave to
those who cracked it.
A GeForce 7900 is probably the minimum spec for hardware playback of
HD movies, but a decent CPU will work just as well.
1Tb+ drives are urgently required!

Mal