Best Blu-Ray player software for PC

NoEcho

NoEcho

2[H]4U
Joined
Aug 14, 2001
Messages
3,250
After installing a Blu-Ray drive on my pc I found that none of my older player software would support Blu-Ray. Not a big surprise, so I downloaded a player off of Newegg - Corell. It played a Blu-Ray once and then started telling me I needed to update some key or something. It stopped playing blu-rays. In fact, now when I try to play a blu-ray my pc reboots.

Cannot convey how much that pisses me off.

At this point I'm wondering what's a decent blu-ray player, one that actually allows you to play blu-rays, doesn't force you to install kludge or log in to their website to establish a relationship but just plays the damn movies. Not interested in the 100 dollar ones because that's just too much.
 
@Dexvx +1. I use Arcsoft TMT and it simply does what it needs to do and it has WMC integration. I actually used both TMT and Powerdvd to test and compare the differences. TMT rocks hands down!
 
Another vote for Arcsoft TMT. It's virtually nag-free as far as upgrading goes, and it's nicely integrated with Media Center with matching play buttons. You can assign Blu-ray folder structure (BDMV) with it in MediaBrowser after ripping it to your media storage.

Best of all, upgrades are small patches, where Cyberlink makes you download the entire freaking program every time there's a new version. A huge plus when Blu-ray manufacturers keep changing their encryption.
 
Another vote for Arcsoft.

One other that hasn't been mentioned is that it still supports HDDVD (although not advertised); this is a big plus for me since I have a hybrid drive and a bunch of HDDVDs...

Cyberlink already dropped HDDVD support since version 8.
 
JohnDC said:
Great player, but it will not play from Blu-Ray disc, only from rips. And by the time you buy AnyDVD HD, you can buy a software player.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but with AnyDVD HD you end up with the bonus ability to rip the content to the hard drive so you can crunch it with HandBrake or whatever... save wear and tear on those rather expensive Blu-ray drives, less handling of the actual Blu-ray media/discs... create massive media center libraries where you can play hundreds if not thousands of movies in a second or two - try doing that with a few shelves of actual Blu-ray physical media.

It's a win-win-win-FTW situation all the way around and twice on Sundays... :)

Just a suggestion, of course.
 
wear and tear, come on, the drive will last for years and by then the prices would be so cheap to buy a new one anyways, Why take HD content just to shrink it and lose quality? and if you dont got a decent system,. spend hours doing it :)

As for making a library, absolutely!l..lol so nice to just sit at a TV and choose movie with out worry of going to get the disk
 
MrGuvernment said:
wear and tear, come on, the drive will last for years and by then the prices would be so cheap to buy a new one anyways, Why take HD content just to shrink it and lose quality? and if you dont got a decent system,. spend hours doing it :)

As for making a library, absolutely!l..lol so nice to just sit at a TV and choose movie with out worry of going to get the disk
Click to expand...

I figure Snowknight26 will pop in and is more than capable of telling you why on that highlighted question... ;)

I've got some Blu-ray rips done with HandBrake in MKV containers and you simply could not tell me the difference between it and the original Blu-ray source material, with all the soundtracks in it, and all the goodies too, and it's 1/8th the size the original content takes on the disc.

There are reasons for the madness, I assure you. :D
 
Bahamut said:
I figure Snowknight26 will pop in and is more than capable of telling you why on that highlighted question... ;)

I've got some Blu-ray rips done with HandBrake in MKV containers and you simply could not tell me the difference between it and the original Blu-ray source material, with all the soundtracks in it, and all the goodies too, and it's 1/8th the size the original content takes on the disc.

There are reasons for the madness, I assure you. :D
Click to expand...

Handbrake cannot process DTS-HD or TrueHD audio (to my knowledge) and has to downsample them to DTS or Dolby Digital. For the most part you can re-encode the video to be half the original size and not notice much quality loss, but down-mixing from a lossless audio format is immediately notice-able with pretty much any decent HT setup.

.02
 
I know, you can get awesome quality from an original BR movie and get it down to 15G in size, and when you have enough movies, that 5-20G of space you saves add's up fast!

The difference really comes with Audio and if you got a seriously high end system to hear it on.
 
this bluray HTPC build for me has been so many hours of wasted time watching the little wheel go round and round, hour spent loading software, hours spent diagnosing why the thing doesnt work trying it every day for a week then all of a sudden without any reason or tweaking it works but the next day it doesnt. Countless hours spent reading forums trying to find if i had missed checking off some box in the file or in the video or buying a new soft ware and having it work a couple of times and then not work until an update three weeks later, And writing the software getting special links which work a couple of times but then even old replays dont work and forget about new releases. This bluray HTPC is bogus and it is the most frustrating consumer manipulation of all time! I have wasted hundreds of hours of my time rebuilding my crashed computer; hundreds of dollars on failed software;
a few thousand on the state of the art HTPC, more than a few thousand on the plasma. all to watch the wheel go round and round.

last year 2009 I learned the arcsoft wrote the drivers for windows media center. Microsoft decided to OEM the whole bluray experiment in september 2008 (did anybody that had vista in sept. actually have a bluray work? blu screen-sho nuff) and 64 bit was in no-wheresville.
but by march of 2009 arcsoft was working at least OK. By sept 2009 it was even respectable. The other two I had sometimes would work when arcsoft didnt but arcsoft more than the others. by jan 2010 only arcsoft work-barely. If I mention Bluray my wife leaves the room to go read a book. And usually another night is wasted trying to get it to work.
and then a week or two later it just does. and it is so fantastic!! we live in the greatest time in human history.

Arcsoft TMT so far is the best they have tweaked it better than others. some times it'l only play thru WMC, sometimes only thru the regular program( which give the couch potato eject inject option).

BUT MOST OF THE TIME THE HTPC BLU RAY EXPERIMENT HURTS.
 
I've tried both TMT3 and PowerDVD 10.

Hands down TMT3. It is smoother, loads quicker, and has a much less annoying interface. It's also able to send DTS HD-MA to my receiver without any problems which is a bonus in my book.
 
GJSNeptune said:
Does TMT support HD-DVD?
Click to expand...

Yes it does

Another vote for TMT here
I used PowerDVD for a couple of years and went through 7/8/9 and it just got worse and worse.

AnyDVD HD to rip to iso, mount with Virtual CloneDrive, TMT to watch.
Got 3x1.5TB drives for Blu-ray images and 1x1.5TB drive for DVD images.
 
lovesupreme said:
this bluray HTPC build for me has been so many hours of wasted time watching the little wheel go round and round, hour spent loading software, hours spent diagnosing why the thing doesnt work trying it every day for a week then all of a sudden without any reason or tweaking it works but the next day it doesnt. Countless hours spent reading forums trying to find if i had missed checking off some box in the file or in the video or buying a new soft ware and having it work a couple of times and then not work until an update three weeks later, And writing the software getting special links which work a couple of times but then even old replays dont work and forget about new releases. This bluray HTPC is bogus and it is the most frustrating consumer manipulation of all time! I have wasted hundreds of hours of my time rebuilding my crashed computer; hundreds of dollars on failed software;
a few thousand on the state of the art HTPC, more than a few thousand on the plasma. all to watch the wheel go round and round.

last year 2009 I learned the arcsoft wrote the drivers for windows media center. Microsoft decided to OEM the whole bluray experiment in september 2008 (did anybody that had vista in sept. actually have a bluray work? blu screen-sho nuff) and 64 bit was in no-wheresville.
but by march of 2009 arcsoft was working at least OK. By sept 2009 it was even respectable. The other two I had sometimes would work when arcsoft didnt but arcsoft more than the others. by jan 2010 only arcsoft work-barely. If I mention Bluray my wife leaves the room to go read a book. And usually another night is wasted trying to get it to work.
and then a week or two later it just does. and it is so fantastic!! we live in the greatest time in human history.

Arcsoft TMT so far is the best they have tweaked it better than others. some times it'l only play thru WMC, sometimes only thru the regular program( which give the couch potato eject inject option).

BUT MOST OF THE TIME THE HTPC BLU RAY EXPERIMENT HURTS.
Click to expand...

ouch that hurts. I was able to get all my Blu-Ray Movie experiences to work well.

TMT3 vote here!
 
lovesupreme said:
this bluray HTPC build for me has been so many hours of wasted time watching the little wheel go round and round, hour spent loading software, hours spent diagnosing why the thing doesnt work trying it every day for a week then all of a sudden without any reason or tweaking it works but the next day it doesnt. Countless hours spent reading forums trying to find if i had missed checking off some box in the file or in the video or buying a new soft ware and having it work a couple of times and then not work until an update three weeks later, And writing the software getting special links which work a couple of times but then even old replays dont work and forget about new releases. This bluray HTPC is bogus and it is the most frustrating consumer manipulation of all time! I have wasted hundreds of hours of my time rebuilding my crashed computer; hundreds of dollars on failed software;
a few thousand on the state of the art HTPC, more than a few thousand on the plasma. all to watch the wheel go round and round.

last year 2009 I learned the arcsoft wrote the drivers for windows media center. Microsoft decided to OEM the whole bluray experiment in september 2008 (did anybody that had vista in sept. actually have a bluray work? blu screen-sho nuff) and 64 bit was in no-wheresville.
but by march of 2009 arcsoft was working at least OK. By sept 2009 it was even respectable. The other two I had sometimes would work when arcsoft didnt but arcsoft more than the others. by jan 2010 only arcsoft work-barely. If I mention Bluray my wife leaves the room to go read a book. And usually another night is wasted trying to get it to work.
and then a week or two later it just does. and it is so fantastic!! we live in the greatest time in human history.

Arcsoft TMT so far is the best they have tweaked it better than others. some times it'l only play thru WMC, sometimes only thru the regular program( which give the couch potato eject inject option).

BUT MOST OF THE TIME THE HTPC BLU RAY EXPERIMENT HURTS.
Click to expand...

This was more or less true until around mid-2009, but ever since Arcsoft TMT v3 and Windows 7, it has been pretty much smooth sailing.

AnyDVD HD to make the Blu-Ray .iso
Store .iso on local HDD or network storage
Use Windows 7 + WMC + MediaBrowser
Configure MediaBrowser so it mounts .iso using Virtual CloneDrive in WMC
Configure MediaBrowser so it uses the Arcsoft TMT plugin to play mounted .iso
Enjoy full feature Blu-Ray better than a set-top box (due to fast load-times).
 
PowerDVD is crapware, it comes burdened with their moovielive or whatever it's called that's constantly demanding you log in to share what you're watching with the world (and presumably their advertisers), and every time someone finds a hack to disable it the next version (that's mandatory because they keep updating BR disks and if you don't have the latest version the latest movies won't play) will disable the previous hacks forcing you to use their crap, and they seem to have no intention of making it optional no matter how many customers complain on their forums.

So yeah skip PowerDVD and get TMT, it does what it's supposed to with no extra crap or ads.
 
dexvx said:
This was more or less true until around mid-2009, but ever since Arcsoft TMT v3 and Windows 7, it has been pretty much smooth sailing.

AnyDVD HD to make the Blu-Ray .iso
Store .iso on local HDD or network storage
Use Windows 7 + WMC + MediaBrowser
Configure MediaBrowser so it mounts .iso using Virtual CloneDrive in WMC
Configure MediaBrowser so it uses the Arcsoft TMT plugin to play mounted .iso
Enjoy full feature Blu-Ray better than a set-top box (due to fast load-times).
Click to expand...

for me instead of mediabrowser i use mymovie. and i use a server for storage...:D
 
Arcsoft TotalMedia Theater gets my vote as well. Also AnyDVD HD and ripbot264 makes for some excellent quality mp4 and mkv rips that cannot be distinguished from the source material on my home theater setup while taking up 1/10th the space. I back up most all our favorite blu-ray media to my windows home server for easy streaming to just about every room in my house.....although I usually make a second 720p and 2ch stereo rip as well for kids movies, for less intensive streaming for the laptop and is compatible with the xbox 360 while still looking great on the 37" LCD in the kids game room.
 
IT'S FIXED!!!!!!
I bought a new Pioneer BDR-205: EVERYTHING WORKS.
So, it was the old Pioneer BDC-202 that caused my grief.

And by the way, TMT3 ROCKS, Arcsofts' support ROCKS- they tried many times to help me this past year and we finally came to the conclusion that the hardware was the problem.
(Now if only Pioneer would give me some kind of voucher credit since the 1st player is long out of warranty.)
 
Glad to hear! Damn I can't believe I didn't mention this because I've had the same problem with TMT3 and it having issues with a BD drive. I discovered the issue when I plugged in my USB BD player and stuff started working when the internal BD drive refused to play discs UNLESS I had AnyDVD running!

Yes, all Blu Ray drives are NOT created equal.
 
Bahamut said:
I figure Snowknight26 will pop in and is more than capable of telling you why on that highlighted question... ;)

I've got some Blu-ray rips done with HandBrake in MKV containers and you simply could not tell me the difference between it and the original Blu-ray source material, with all the soundtracks in it, and all the goodies too, and it's 1/8th the size the original content takes on the disc.

There are reasons for the madness, I assure you. :D
Click to expand...

Really? in what audio codec ? what is the point of a rip when you have to downgrade the audio to get a reasonable file size.
 
I still have one of the Blue/HD players and fought with power dvd for years until arcsofts last version which works great. Just make sure your firmware is current and that they can update software so that if can decrypt the latest bluray keys. The other is to make sure you have a decent videocard or cpu as decoding is one of the most resource intensive things a pc can do.
 
Hi guys,

I don't want to start a new topic so I will ask you here. I've read in these blu-ray player reviews http://www.reviewmaze.com/2011/01/windows-blu-ray-player-software.html that both, Powerdvd and Totalmedia Theatre work great as integrated in WMC. Could somebody share a personal experience with WMC integration? Which of the both software players works better? Also has somebody tested 2d to 3d conversion feature of powerdvd?
 
does tmt do bd 3d? also, I'm impressed a the command of the english language in this thread, as demonstrated by the n00bies. :rolleyes:
 
i haven't had any good experiences with with either PowerDVD or TMT.

Both of them skip video on me, still looking for other solutions.
 
My best solution has been ripping them to MKV and playing back on WMC/WMP12. But I can see thats not a feasible solution for many.
 
I have been using TMT3 and TMT5 for a while with my old Opteron based htpc without issue.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top