Re: Experiments in HD

["Rob Dobson" <ukha@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think the 2 memory devices you mention are USB hubs. The HD DVD
drive has 2 USB ports on the back, they also appear under the USB
section of device manager on my Vista system.

Cheers,

Rob


--- In ukha_d@xxxxxxx, "Mal Lansell" <mal@...> wrote:
>
> 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
>