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News, Analysis, and Opinion on Microsoft Digital Media Technologies (and TGB News!)

Media Center Gets Blu-ray, Just Not From Microsoft

I’ve talk about Microsoft and Blu-ray more times than I can count and it never fails I end up saying they will not be the ones to build Blu-ray support in Windows.  My thoughts have officially come true with yesterday’s announcement that Microsoft is outsourcing Blu-ray support in Windows 7 to Cyberlink.

According to the press release, PowerDVD “automatically integrate with Windows Media Center to enable full Blu-ray playback capability on PC equipped with the appropriate hardware.”  The extent of that integration remains to be seen, but I’m hoping for full integration using Media Foundation and PVP (aka real integration).  That's a lot of wishful thinking on my part, what we will likely end up with is Media Center launching PowerDVD in a Play Movie-esk way.

I guess this is a good start and I’m interested to see what the product will look like but I’m not getting my hopes up too high just yet for it being the perfect solution.

Cross Posted from Chris Lanier's Blog at http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/
Published Jan 09 2009, 07:37 AM by Chris - Moderator
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Comments

 

Dwight2001 said:

Just watched the video on EngadgetHD and I wasn't that impressed.  In typical PowerDVD fashion it seems it only plays Disc and not Files stored on a Hard Disc.  I don't think it's an improvement over TMT, with exception to the nice audio features.  So I'll stick wtih Arcsoft for now.

Plus, just because HDDVD lost the war doesn't mean the technology stopped working.  I still watch my HDDVD's on TMT!
January 9, 2009 8:37 PM
 

djp952 said:

engadgethd has posted a video regarding this.  Wasn't working for me, but maybe they'll fix it:

http://www.engadgethd.com/2009/01/09/video-cyberlinks-native-media-center-blu-ray-player/

-djp
January 9, 2009 8:43 PM
 

Tony_Park said:

Arcsoft have confirmed that they are working on an upgrade to TMT to allow TMT to work under Windows 7, which currently it won't do.

Tony
January 10, 2009 4:04 AM
 

monkeydeathsonic said:

Nice use of the crystall ball, Chris. They also did this with apps like disk defragmenter. After thinking about it for 10 seconds, I think its better that MS ddn't do this on their own. As long as the integration is tight, I think I would rather have cyberlink building this than MS based the quality of their codecs to date.
January 10, 2009 9:28 AM
 

hamiltonguy said:

Meh, I was pretty big on MS supporting blu in win 7.  With support for M2TS files natively in 7, I will just rip my blu-ray movies as single M2TS files.  
January 14, 2009 12:17 PM


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