Add massive removable storage—and HD movies—to your PC with an internal Blu-ray recorder.
By John A. Burek
In January, Blu-Ray finally trounced its competition, HD DVD, in the high-definition, high-capacity format war. If you've been waiting for a winner to emerge before investing in a next-generation drive, that time has arrived. Under-$200 Blu-ray drives are now available as PC upgrades, but these only play prerecorded Blu-ray discs—they don't write them. These drives are a good deal for watching HD movies, but a big part of Blu-ray's appeal is its massive storage, too. It supports whopping capacities of 25GB on single-layer discs and 50GB on double-layer ones. We installed a Sony BWU200S internal Blu-ray recorder in a recent-model Windows Vista entertainment PC. What we found: The physical install may be duck soup, but you must line up quite a few hardware drakes in a row before you can spin up Blu-ray movies.
Can you do-ray?
CyberLink's BD/HD DVD Advisor
Blu-ray's hardware demands for movie playback are much more particular than if you're using the drive strictly for storage. If you want to display Blu-ray movies from a PC drive at HD resolutions (720p, 1080i, or 1080p) using a pure-digital connection—thereby guaranteeing top quality—your PC's entire display subsystem must comply with a standard called High-Definition Content Protection (HDCP). HDCP confers you no direct benefit, but it guarantees the movie studios a secure, piracy-free environment for playing back their content. Your graphics card or onboard graphics chipset, and your display (whether an LCD monitor or HDTV), must both support HDCP. You'll also need a digital connection between them that supports HDCP signals (either DVI or HDMI), plus an HDCP-compliant graphics driver and disc-playback program. (Vista's Media Center and Windows Media Player, unfortunately, won't work.)
If you're lacking some pieces of the HDCP puzzle, you can—for the moment—watch Blu-ray movies at HD resolutions over an analog VGA interface, but its slightly lesser quality partly defeats the purpose of the upgrade. Also, this may be a temporary allowance. Blu-ray content providers have the option (not yet exercised) to manufacture their discs to include an Image Constraint Token (ICT), an electronic flag that throttles playback to low resolutions if HDCP is not present through the entire playback chain. As a result, we recommend the digital route for top quality and future-proofing, using a late-model, HDCP-compliant graphics card and display. (You're going to need the graphics pep to decode Blu-ray smoothly, anyway.)
Your CPU and RAM must also be up to snuff. The CPU requirements for Blu-ray vary by CPU line, but you'll need at least a recent Intel (Pentium 4, Pentium D, or dual- or multicore model) or AMD (Athlon 64 X2 or Phenom multicore model) processor. You'll also want 2GB of RAM under Vista, or 1GB with Windows XP.
To evaluate your PC, download CyberLink's BD/HD DVD Advisor utility (www.cyberlink.com, in the Support section) for an automatic "Blu-ray fitness" scan. It's a beta utility and can be a little balky (more on that later), but it gets the job done. In our case, it reported that our graphics card, a year-old ATI Radeon X1650 Pro, wasn't HDCP-compliant. The cord was connected to a 26-inch Toshiba HDTV that was green-lighted for HDCP. So we added another upgrade: a new graphics card. If you need one too, make sure your PC has a PCI Express (PCIe) x16 slot before proceeding. (Head to our graphics card door for recent graphics cards we recommend.)
Upgrade your graphics
Catalyst Control Panel
We went the budget route, since we're not gamers. Cards based on the ATI Radeon HD 3450 chipset are inexpensive, HDCP-compliant, and, in some models, passively cooled—meaning no fan noise to mar your movies. Around $50, HD 3450 cards are a good stopgap measure for Blu-ray; their step-up sibling, the HD 3650 (around $80), is another option if your graphics demands are greater.
If you're upgrading, visit Device Manager, locate your old graphics card or chipset, click its Driver tab, and uninstall its drivers. Next, download the new card's most recent drivers. Shut down and unplug the PC, detach the display cable, and open the case to extract the old card, if any, from the PCIe slot. (Unscrew the card from the backplane, then press the catch on the slot to release the card.) The new card snaps in; screw it down, reseal the case, and connect the card to a conventional monitor via one of its DVI ports. Our full-height HD 3450 card had two DVI outputs and included a special DVI-to-HDMI dongle, which enables this card to carry the audio signal over the HDMI connection. (Ordinary DVI ports and generic DVI-to-HDMI converters carry only a video signal.) We'll use this converter to hook up our new graphics card to our HDTV via HDMI—our HDTV, like most, doesn't have a DVI port, so we bought an HDMI cable, too. (Incidentally, don't pay the outrageous premiums electronics retailers often charge for these cables; the $5 generic one we bought worked just fine.)
If your primary display is an HDTV, getting the new card to recognize it over HDMI is troublesome without first installing the card's driver and using it to "force detect" the HDTV. That conventional LCD or CRT monitor you connected earlier will let you see what you're doing while configuring the driver. Connect your HDTV, using the dongle and HDMI cable, to the other DVI port on the card, and make sure the HDTV is on and set to its HDMI input.
Boot up, and you should reach the desktop on the PC monitor; install the graphics driver and reboot. Then, if you're using an ATI card, right-click the desktop, open the Catalyst Control Panel, and, in Advanced view, hit Detect Displays (in the Displays Manager menu) to locate your HDTV. Right-click the icon for the HDTV once it appears, and choose the Clone selection; this will duplicate the desktop on both displays. (If you have an nVidia card and the HDTV is not detected in the equivalent driver utility—nVidia Control Panel—click on "My display is not shown in the list" and select Rigorous Display Detection on the subsequent screen, as well as "Force television detection on startup.") Once the HDTV is detected via HDMI, detach the monitor from its DVI port and set the HDTV to the appropriate native resolution.
Next, set up your audio output. The HD 3450 card carried our PC's audio signal to our HDTV over the HDMI cable, and we rerouted that audio to our simple two-speaker stereo system via the audio output jacks on our HDTV. If you have an elaborate home theater surround system with an A/V receiver, however, you might prefer to use the audio outputs on your PC proper, depending on your TV's ability to pass through the signal. Either way, in Vista, right-click the volume icon in the taskbar, choose Playback Devices, highlight the audio output you want the PC to use (HDMI, S/PDIF, or analog), and hit Set Default.
Install the drive
Installing the Sony Blu-ray drive is a cinch: A Serial ATA (SATA) interface eliminates hassles regarding jumper settings or IDE cable positioning. Our PC had just one 5.25-inch drive bay, so we unscrewed the IDE DVD burner in it, detached its IDE cable and four-pin Molex power lead, and pulled it out. (If your case uses rails to mount drives, detach them, or look for spares inside the case.) We also removed the IDE cable entirely, since we had no other IDE drives. (Important: If your IDE cable has a second drive on it, make sure the drive resides on the cable's end connector and that its jumper is set to Master or Cable Select.)
Next, slide the Blu-ray drive into your chassis, screwing or locking it in place. Recent power supplies will have spare SATA power connectors; plug one into the drive, minding the L-shaped keying. Then plug the bundled data cable into the lowest-numbered unused SATA port on your motherboard and into the drive.
Finally, check that the drive drawer has clearance to open. The BWU200S's disc tray has a face bigger than most, and because our PC case had a door covering the optical-drive bay, the BWU200S's drawer couldn't pass through. We had to carefully remove its face. (It snaps off vertically.)
If you don't want to go through the hassle of opening your case, LaCie offers an external Blu-ray burner, and Buffalo Technology has announced that it will be introducing one in the near future. These drives make bringing Blu-ray to your PC as easy as plugging in a USB cable.
Install and configure the software
CyberLink
Boot your PC, and watch during the POST whether the Blu-ray drive is detected on the appropriate SATA channel. (Our PC reported it as a "DVD RW"—no worries.) Once in Windows, test-play a music CD to check the drive's basic functionality.
Sony supplies a disc of CyberLink software in the box. Run its installer (you'll have to select the whole package) and reboot as indicated. When you're done, you'll have a host of apps useful for Blu-ray: PowerDVD (for disc playback); Power2Go (for general burning tasks); PowerProducer (for authoring your own high-def videos to Blu-ray discs); PowerDirector (for disc creation and editing); the self-explanatory PowerBackup; and InstantBurn (for packet-writing data—more on that in Step 5).
None of this software, however, will play commercial Blu-ray movies as-is. Instructions in the box direct you to a free PowerDVD upgrade on Sony's support site that enables Blu-ray movie playback. On the site, enter your software disc's key code, download the 72MB update, run the installer, then reboot.
It's now time for Blu-ray's big debut. We inserted a 2006 MGM title,Flyboys, launched PowerDVD, hit play"¦and promptly met an "Error 0012," signifying an incompatible graphics driver—odd, since we installed ATI's latest. We reran CyberLink's BD/HD DVD Advisor; it also insisted the driver was not HDCP-compliant. After some trial and error, we found that uninstalling and reinstalling the graphics driver—the very same version—fixed the problem. Soon after, we were watching Flyboys' biplane battles in all their high-res glory.
Later, for curiosity's sake, we hooked up the HDTV via its VGA port instead of HDMI and launched PowerDVD. It played the disc hitch-free—no HDCP hassles—though the image was slightly less vivid.
Burn your first disc
Power2Go
We tested Blu-ray's other strength—storage—by using a write-once Blu-ray (BD-R) disc to back up our multithousand-file MP3 collection. Burner software you own won't burn to Blu-ray discs unless it's recent-vintage, but the bundled Power2Go will do the basics. InstantBurn, for packet writing, is another option; it works only with rewritable media or BD-Rs, letting you record to these discs ad hoc, as if they are hard drives or floppies. The resulting discs will only be readable under InstantBurn, however.
We opted for Power2Go. We launched it, chose Blu-ray Disc from the initial menu, and, on the next screen, browsed for our files to burn, dragging them into the lower window. If your data exceeds the capacity of a single BD-R disc, a handy feature in Power2Go can bridge the burn across several discs. (Go to Burning > Configuration > Data, and check off "Auto-split content by disc capacity.")
We were now ready to click "burn," but we hesitated. There's one thing you can't help but remember just before every Blu-ray burn: Blu-ray media is expensive! A 25GB single-layer BD-R disc—basically, a Blu-ray CD-R—is $10 to $15, so you won't want to burn one until you're sure of success. When writing your first disc, we suggest using a BD-RE disc (a Blu-ray rewritable) in case something goes awry. Alternately, for BD-R, do a simulated burn first; navigate to Burning > Configuration > Burner and check off "Write simulation before burning." Once you achieve a successful test burn, deactivate the box and burn the real thing.
Tweak Your Display for Blu-ray
Cracking your PC case is only half the hardware challenge when you're installing a Blu-ray PC drive for movie playback. If your display device is an HDTV, you'll want to optimize its settings for showing Blu-ray movies. This is an art unto itself and, for the truly serious, worth the $200-plus fee for professional calibration.
Instead of shelling out all those bucks—or settling for best-guess tweaks—get an HDTV-optimization DVD. An excellent compromise, it will employ some combination of test patterns, wizards, primers, and other exercises to walk you through the process. The only one currently Blu-ray-specific is Digital Video Essentials: HD Basics Blu-ray ($29.95,www.dvdinternational.com), but DVD-centric alternatives from Monster Cable (HDTV Calibration Wizard) and Ovation Multimedia (Avia II Guide to Home Theater, $49.99, www.ovationmultimedia.com) will also get your display outshining its stock settings.
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