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The main component in playing HD content on a media centre PC is Cyberlink PowerDVD. There aren’t many (if any) alternatives at present and it is a seriously flawed piece of software (possibly due to the lack of any serious competition).

So What’s wrong with it?

Due to the flux in the HD-DVD and Blu-ray specifications, and the various implementations of these by the disks coming onto the market, updates to PowerDVD are relatively frequent. This could usually be considered a good thing but unfortunately, it has introduced something of a lottery as to what will play with a particular version; fix one thing and break another seems to be the norm.

Not to mention that during one seeming minor release (somewhere between 3319a & 3319f) the ability to play HD content from the hard disk was removed.

Never fear though. Such restrictive measures and bugs are like red rags to the resourful bulls out there.

Fist off, it’s worth keeping the various updates to PowerDVD since there’s no repository of them and there’s good chance you’ll need to rollback at some point.

To retain the ability to play from the hard drive you can only go as far as 3319a. I’ve sacrificed that and use DAEMON Tools Lite to mount disk images to get round the problem, though I am currently frozen at 3319f, since anything beyond that has broken something else, big time (from the video decoding in Windows Media Center to seeing a number of disks as being in an invalid format).

I still have two disks that wont play on 3319f; Spider-man 3 and Ratatouille on Blu-ray. To watch these I either have to upgrade to the latest patch. Alternatively, at least it has worked with Spider-man 3, I can rip the disk image (for which I use ImgBurn) and then it seems to work.

There are documented ways of running multiple versions of PowerDVD, but I haven’t tried these yet.

Obviously running an older version of piece of software like PowerDVD is going to have drawbacks, but most of the incompatibilities are resolved by Slysoft’s AnyDVD HD.

It doesn’t look that this problem is going to go away in a hurry, but hopefully, now the format war is over it may be reasonable to anticipate some seblance of stability. I certainly hope so as the majority of problems I have encountered so far have been with Blu-ray disks…