Is Blu-ray worth it? (Warning Big Pics)

[ZaZ]

I upgraded my R60 to a IPS screen and I thought a Blu-ray drive might be a good use of the nice screen. The Blu-ray drive I bought arrived earlier in the week. It was made for the R61, but works perfectly well in the R60. I was a little concerned that the X1300 graphics card on my machine wouldn't have what it takes, but I managed to get it to play back without any issues. It does look pretty good, better than the standard h264 encode from a ripped DVD, though perhaps the pics don't show the difference too well. The downside is without the nine-cell battery, I doubt you'll have a enough battery power to watch a whole movie on battery, since you have to run in high performance mode to get it play smoothly. I just got a new six-cell. I won't be getting a new battery anytime soon. I don't think the X1300 is helping much if any. Maybe there's a way to get it to boost playback, but I haven't had a chance to look. Interestingly enough the drive in my 14" R60, which is almost the machine on the inside except it has the Intel GPU, won't play any Blu-rays at all. PowerDVD says there's a GPU issue, but maybe there's a way to get it working. I'm hoping Windows 7 offers something better for the play back issues. Here's some pics of it if you care to look:

The top of the drive


The bezel of the drive


The drive in device manager


PowerDVD playing a Blu-ray movie


A shot of the same scene using a h264 encoded Mp4 playing in VLC

[yak]

I'm able to play BD-ripped movies (as I don't have a Blu-ray disc drive) on my Intel GMA 950 based T60 using the CoreAVC Professional codec:
http://www.coreavc.com/

The trick is this codec splits the docoding between both CPU cores making my 1.83 GHz CoreDuo decode with the speed of a normal (single-core) codec running on a 3.66 GHz CPU.

Pretty amazing, isn't free however.

[chazz]

FredGarvin
this is great news!
do you have any software issues on the R60? Just plug and play on the machine (R60)?
if you are able to play Blu-ray on a R60...how about T60(p)?
I know he Blu-ray drive for R60/61 is thicker..than the t series drives..
But now Lenovo also have the new thinner Blu-ray drive for the new t400/500
wondering if that will work also with the T60's ...
Hows the quality of the movies? any real big difference?
flexview + blu-ray should be a pretty amazing movie experience...

[chazz]

Found the Blu-ray drive for t400/500 and W series...that i am talking about...

FRU 42T2517

[ZaZ]

The new drives will not work on the T60 because the T60 uses a PATA drive while the newer Blu-ray drives on the T400/T500 use SATA connectors. You can pick up the dock and use it that way. Occasionally there are some visual quirks while playing Blu-ray, but it looks good. The X1300 or X1400 aren't set up to help with Blu-ray decoding. The CPU is doing all the work and runs between 70-90% during playback. If you can find a drive to work the V5200 on the T60p I think can help with the decoding. I was thinking of trying CoreAVC but thought it was for nVidia cards while mine is an ATI card.

[Radioguy]

Last I knew, there were no upcoming models of BD for Ultrabay Slim, and Ultrabay Enhanced won't fit a T61 short of in the Advanced Dock. Has that changed? I'd be primarily interested in a BD burner over player, since I'd like to archive, and BD movies haven't come down that far in price yet for me to shell out for a player alone at full retail. Yet, I'd like to know if even a BD player were coming for the Slim.

[ZaZ]

I think the chances of you seeing one are slim to none, just like even though there's a ton of PATA hard drive notebooks out there, you can't buy a new 7200RPM PATA hard drive.