CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

nuttall_chris

I purchased the LG GGC-H20L HD-DVD/Bluray combo drive from NCIX, total cost shipped was $336 canadian. This drive works perfectly. I have tested it with both HD-DVD and Bluray disks and have had no issues. Fast load times of around 20 seconds on both HD-DVD and Bluray disks. It also comes with PowerDVD Ultra 7.3. I didn't install the software as I already have PowerDVD Ultra installed.

For all you HTPC guys out there, this is the most cost effective way to get into both formats.

Chris.

Moose · Joined: 09 Mar 2006 Posts: 788 Location: Minnesota

Does PowerDVD Ultra come with the drive? What video/sound cards are you using? Will this play PAL discs?

You're lucky you got in the first batch. NCIX reports that their first large batch sold out, they're getting another small batch and from then on the drive will be of limited availablity for quite a while until LG is able to up production.

Have you considered getting AnyDvd-HD to remove HDCP encryption and regional coding?

nuttall_chris · Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 2:40 pm Post subject:

Power DVD Ultra does come with the drive. I'm using a Nvidia 8500GT video card and a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz audio card. Don't know if it plays PAL.

I also have AnyDVD-HD.

Chris.

scottap · Joined: 27 Mar 2007 Posts: 177 Location: Palo Alto, CA

Are you using custom timings? I know the NVIDIA 8xxx series doesn't work with Powerstrip and NVIDIA's software doesn't always work when trying to tweak the timings. Or at least I've had a lot of problems with it.

nuttall_chris · Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2007 5:37 pm Post subject:

I use the Nvidia software for custom timing. No major problems except when setting up the custom timing when you try to use the "test" function it sometimes doesn't actually test the changes you made. I always test, then save, then select the resolution I want in the change resolution tab. This seems to work consistantly.

I found that the porches were much to long at 1080P, I shortend the porches quite a bit to allow maximum raster usage.

Chris.

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 12:56 am Post subject:

Excellent! Can't wait to get my hands on this drive. I checked Best Buy in the US and Canada two weeks ago. They don't have it yet, the salesman did say their LG rep said it would street in November.

Thanks for the tip on setting custom resolutions with the Nvidia cards, I just bought a 8600 and everytime I reboot i looses it's settings.

nuttall_chris · Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 1:14 am Post subject:

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 1:41 am Post subject:

Good question, I'll have to check that out. lol I have the font size cranked and I didn't notice an Save button.

Darren Wadsworth · Joined: 20 Mar 2006 Posts: 238 Location: Tacoma, Washington

draganm · Joined: 08 Mar 2006 Posts: 8990 Location: Colorado

I just asked a firend of mine who builds PC's about this drive and he said

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:54 am Post subject:

Why would it be any different than the X-BOX HD-DVD drive? That works on XP just fine. All the drive is doing is reading the disk.

Chris what are you running for an OS?

ecrabb · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 7:15 am Post subject:

I don't know why he'd say that dragan, unless he's about a year behind on his reading. There was some talk about HD content and players eventually only running on Vista with Trusted Computing and all that bull****, but as far as I know - nothing is to that point yet.

Analog, it's true that the drive is just reading the disc, but the software that's going to do something with whatever the drive reads has to work on a given OS and hardware! Given that, what's most important, are the system requirements for the app that's going to be playing the content from the discs - presumably PowerDVD Ultra - which, from what I'm reading is perfectly happy playing HD-DVD and BD on an XP box - as long as you have the horsepower.

On this page, there's an "advisor" you can download that will check your machine to see if you'll be able to run HD content:
http://www.cyberlink.com/english/support/bdhd_support/index.jsp

Also consider, unless you're running something like AnyDVD HD, PowerDVD is going to expect to see an HDCP-capable video card with an HDCP-compliant display attached to it... or it's going to force 480p (I think it's 480p).

http://www.slysoft.com/en/anydvdhd.html

The price on that combo drive is awesome. I'd go the HTPC route in a heartbeat if I didn't have to drop a grand (that I want to spend on 37 other toys) on a video card, motherboard, PSU, and RAM. My existing machine isn't even close.

SC

oliverg · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 7:57 am Post subject:

XP works fine although Vista supports EVR out of the box.

I believe that Power DVD Ultra uses EVR when hardware acceleration is selected. EVR and VMR9 renderless are the only two renderers that I like on my HTPC. (Haali is OK)

Vista and its Media Foundation (which EVR is part of) is pretty impressive. The PQ is very acceptable!

When playing DVDs, you can use VMR9 renderless on both XP and Vista and codecs like FFDShow with its nice sharpening features.

I've noticed (with DVDs) that unless I use VMR9 renderless exclusive mode, tearing can be an issue with my 8800GTXs - even with VSynch on. I've only used Power DVD Ultra with my XBox HD-DVD player, with HW acceleration on and I really like it (I use Vista). There isn't any tearing which seems to happen with Direct Show renderers.

IMHO getting Vista now is going to futureproof you. Vista is absolutely fantastic - its dead stable and the newer technologies are always developed on it. As with what happened with XP and 2000, XP will slowly be phased out. There are a lot of people that bagged Vista but their memories are usually quite short - the very same types of issues occured when XP was first deployed. "XP is cr*p, use 2000 its much better" .. those same people are now saying the same things about XP and Vista except the catch cry is "Use XP, Vista is c*ap"

Cheers

nuttall_chris · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 11:53 am Post subject:

I'm using XP right now, but only because my sound card is not compatible with Vista. When I decide to change out the sound card I will re-install Vista. I'm running a a quad core processor with 2G of RAM and an Nvidia 8500GT so I have lots of horsepower to make this work.

Chris.

draganm · Joined: 08 Mar 2006 Posts: 8990 Location: Colorado

thanks for the reply's. I've read enough to realize my plan to get rid of HTPC is a good one. by the time I got my 3 year old HTPC capable of HD + the drive it would cost a lot more than even buying both players from Toshiba and Sony. I admire all the people that can make all this stuff work but it's definitely beyond my tolerance level.

**AnalogRocks** · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 4:16 pm Post subject:

nuttall_chris · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 5:25 pm Post subject:

One of the main reasons I have sold off my stand alone Blu-ray player and gone the HTPC route is the ability to customize porches and refresh rates. I have a total of $1100 into my HTPC, that includes a Core 2 Quad processor, 2G ram, 500G HD, Nvidia 8500GT, the new HD-DVD/Blu-ray drive, plus all the other bits and parts needed to make that a fully functioning computer. I can now play back in any format available at any resolution, with any refresh rate I want. There is no way that could be matched with stand alone players plus a scaler, which would be required to get 1080P 72hz plus custom porches.

I also found that the Blu-ray player I had had very very short porches and my marquee was clipping of alot of the left and right sides of the picture, the only way to correct this would have been a scaler. I think I have less into my HTPC than the cost of the scaler required to fix the problems with the Blu-ray player.

Chris.

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

Only one 500G HD? I'm playing on my toy with five of them.

Phil Smith · Joined: 08 Mar 2006 Posts: 7717

nuttall_chris · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 6:54 pm Post subject: