Video Asylum

Posted by bassbinotoko (A) on December 08, 2012 at 17:12:00

In Reply to: RE: blu-ray stand alone vs. computer posted by jskid301@yahoo.com on December 08, 2012 at 09:57:39

Figuring out the audio path from the player to the sound card isn't very obvious on a computer. Not like with a standalone player where you just plug HDMI or S/PDIF into the receiver or processor. Computer playback made sense when standalone players were over $600, but now you can get a decent Blu-ray player for less than the price of the full version of a software player.

The third option could be a media player like the WDTV Live or Boxeeee Box. Many of those (including the WDTV) don't support DTS-MA and TrueHD, yet. However, I think you can convert the high-res audio to multichannel PCM using eac3to. Audio playback over S/PDIF seems to be bit-perfect. I don't know about the video over HDMI, but it looks fine to me, and I often was annoyed by DVD compression artifacts in the past. The WDTV is great for non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs, since it can zoom by usefully small increments.