Thinkpads Forum

Hello, TPers,

I'm late to the Blu-ray party, and have been trying to get a player to function on a T61p. (This machine has a replaced nVidia Quadro FX570M graphics card.) Not happening. Do you know why?

I've tried VLC, SlySoft AnyDVD HD, and finally ArcSoft Total Media Theatre 5. The only software that provides a picture is ArcSoft's. (VLC throws an error, and SlySoft seems to quit.) The problem with TMT is that the video is garbled. It plays the top part of the screen nicely, and the lower half drops out.

The hardware that I'm using is an Asus SBW-06C1S-U Blu-ray Writer, which has the Intel HDCP hardware copy protection built in, but I'm not doing anything other than playing a recently purchased Blu-ray (National Geographic's "Great Migrations," with AACS copy protection) directly on my laptop's internal monitor.

Is the Quadro FX570M able to play BD? Any personal success with this? Do I need to get a different BD Writer?

A.K.A wrote:The hardware that I'm using is an Asus SBW-06C1S-U Blu-ray Writer, which has the Intel HDCP hardware copy protection built in

Anydvd hd should bypass any copy proection. I was able to play blu-rays on my R60 using PowerDVD along with AnyDVD HD. Playback was OK. It worked better in XP than Vista, but since the CPU ran between 95-100% all the time, it could be choppy. The X1400 I had does not offload decoding. I would think the quadro card would as they offered a blu-ray drive on the R61 and I think the 140m card in it did offload decoding, but honestly, I can't really remember. I hope that helps.

Fred, this is great -- I just need some help understanding your explanation.

"the CPU ran between 95-100% all the time"

Does Blu-ray really put that high a demand on the CPU -- or GPU? This drive passes data off to the T61p via USB 2.0!!! Where's the processor load coming from?

And how fast was the GPU / CPU in your lappie?

"The X1400 I had does not offload decoding."

I'm not following -- I'm still new to BD. I'm trying to understand what is NOT happening here. Could you explain what happens when a machine "offloads decoding""? If this helps, I ran an assessment tool that said the laptop has no "hardware dual-video decoding capability" for H.264, MPEG-2, and VC-1. (And what's meant by "dual-video"? "Dual" what?)

Thanks!

It did require than much CPU usage on the R60. I think it is the blu-ray. If you ripped and re-encoded the same blu-ray, then played, the CPU usage was between 30-40%. That was on a T7400.

Newer GPUs can take on some of the decoding, which lessens the load on the CPU, but the R60s GPU does not offer this. It's up to the CPU to do it all. I don't know if the 570 does. If so it would help lessen the load on the CPU.

Found a solution.

I had to install Slysoft's AnyDVD HD, rip an ISO to hard drive, and then mount that ISO with Virtual CloneDrive. From there I played it with Media Player Classic - Home Cinema (MPC-HC), plus updating to the latest Microsoft DirectX filters.

Perfect playback -- no stuttering or choppiness.