Question On Crippled PowerDVD Software For Blu-ray

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1gkar

722 posts

Ultimate Geek

#29035 20-Dec-2008 08:06

I am looking to purchase a Blu-ray drive -not sure if it will be a BD writer or reader at present- & I notice they all have a version of PowerDVD7 that restricts audio to 2-channel. The question: in the past, most crippled versions still allowed SPDif to work. Is this still the case, or is an upgrade to Ultra required. Cheers.

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datahawk

256 posts

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#185432 21-Dec-2008 10:26

1gkar: I am looking to purchase a Blu-ray drive -not sure if it will be a BD writer or reader at present- & I notice they all have a version of PowerDVD7 that restricts audio to 2-channel. The question: in the past, most crippled versions still allowed SPDif to work. Is this still the case, or is an upgrade to Ultra required. Cheers.

I have a PowerDVD 7.3 BD 2-channel that came with my LiteOn 401 BD drive (which is a good drive and has perfromed without problems from day 1).

There is no SPDIF option to be found.

I upgraded to PowerDVD Ultra 8 in the end for my HTPC but the 7.3 copy is useful for my desktop PC. The 7.3 version does have 2,4,6 or 8 channel output but it is a Cyberlink format. It sounds fine on my 5.1 PC speaker setup but it 'aint' Dolby.

1gkar

722 posts

Ultimate Geek

#185435 21-Dec-2008 10:42

Thanks for the reply, datahawk. How much did the upgrade from the crippled version cost?

Well, I was hopeful. Nice AV gear, BTW.

datahawk

256 posts

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#185455 21-Dec-2008 11:06

1gkar: Thanks for the reply, datahawk. How much did the upgrade from the crippled version cost?

Well, I was hopeful. Nice AV gear, BTW.

No problem. I think the upgrade was around $75 US. It was a huge $15 US discount

Ultra 8 is fine but I don't like all the Movie Live stuff in it. Fortunately you don't have to use this aspect. It gives me excellent 7.1 multi-channel (PCM) sound via my on board HDMI.

Intel and Cyberlink are both trying to improve Blu-ray with the G45 grahics and there have been teething problems and BIOS problems. I currently have a problem where my PowerDVD is going to total green screen if I flash to the most recent BIOS updates. I'm still trying to find out where and why because I want to get the best hardware acceleration that I can. (I don't actually need it because I still get near perfect Blu-ray at 20-30% cpu use without HA on my system)

Cheers
Paul

bigbob

38 posts

Geek

Trusted

#185807 23-Dec-2008 12:58

If you are looking for SPDIF passthru to be able to decode DD / DTS 5.1 etc in your surround amp then PowerDVD v7.3 can do this. I am not in front of my machine but I was able to set it up to SPDIF pass thru which works fine for basic 5.1 blu-ray audio. The limitiation is that it will not decode 5.1 in software or the High Def versions of DTS, Dobly Digital

Keep looking the option is there somewhere and it is quite OK until they sort out software decoding of all the high def formats.

Bob