Sunday, March 14, 2010

Fun with Cyberlink software and Blu-ray

Still having hassles with Blue-ray!

I'm starting to dislike this.

At first it wasnt recognising any BD (Blu-ray) disks at all, and not even plain DVDs.
Rolling back this time didnt fix it.

Everytime I rolled back, the system got a little more polluted with debris; since I want this system  pristine, this is disturbling. Eventually I couldn't roll back any further.

Anyway.. nothing worked. Its always saying my display device is not HDCP compliant.
Got deperate and tried AnyDVD... now this is my kind of software! Not bloated, clean interface and bypassed the HDCP without any effort at all.

Trouble is, its not free and MINE SHOULD WORK!

This morning I blew windows away and started again.

Reinstall Windows 7.
Register
Get all patches
Install Mobo drivers from CD
Install Graphics from download.
Install Cyberlink PowerDVD from CD
Update PowerDVD from download
Register PowerDVD

No luck - darn it.

As a last resort, I checked the cable at the back and there was an ever so tiny bit of give when I pushed it.

Thought to myself, its nothing... but what do you know... it fixed the problem!

So if there is a learning to be taken from this is this: HDMI is *not* like any other cable... my graphics and sound were perfect, but that slightly loose connection may have been behind several hours of wasted effort and a lot of angst.

I lost all of my music rips and a few DVD rips that I enjoyed making yesterday and will need to do again.

To guard against crapping all over my nice clean system again, I pulled out an old IDE 80 Gig HDD that I've been hoarding and used the Windows 7 System Backup feature to image the system onto the drive. Now at least I can get back to this point without spending hours and hours.

Yesterday wasnt a complete deadloss... I learned that lots of my old favorite software doesnt work under 64-bit Windows. I'll tell you about it next post.

4 comments:

  1. Thought I'd comment that some programs can be run in compatability mode under Windows 7 64 bit. This in effect runs them under a "ghost" version of windows (usually Windows XP) and therefore under the old 32 bit base.

    Not great for software such as DVD players but fine for games, things like photoshop, etc.

    Do a search on Google, should exaplin how to enable it for any given program.

    Otherwise great blog.

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  2. Have you thought of getting the trial of Total Media Theater (Theatre)? It leaves Power DVD for dead IMHO. They can both be installed concurrently.

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  3. Yep, I've got no doubt that its probably better - but why is it so darn expensive!?

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  4. With regard to AnyDVD did you try AnyDVD or AnyDVD-HD ? You need the latter for Blu-ray.
    You should then have no difficulties with the 21-day trial.

    Another application (free) from the same developer (Slysoft) is Clown_BD which is basically a gui for a number of other programs that edit blu-ray content and strip the main movie from the rest of the garbage on the BD disk. Doing this can also solve playback problems.

    I haven't seen what HDD's you have for media storage but the 1.5tb ones are very good for this purpose.

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