One more addition was just made to the beast. I just grabbed an XBox 360 HD-DVD player from someone, brand new for $155.00! So? What good does that do your MCE rig? I'm certain you're asking. Well...ask away! This puppy is just a USB 2.0 Toshiba HD DVD drive. Simply plug it into the Vista box, it recognizes new hardware, goes online, grabs drivers for the XBox 360 HD-DVD ROM drive and installs everything absolutely perfectly! The hardware installation was the easy part. The tough part is the MC integration. As of right now, Vista does not support HD-DVD integration natively. I'm certain that will change at some point soon, but right now, you need to run a 3rd party application. Well, that's a bitch! You mean I gotta close out MCE, grab my mouse or keyboard, launch another app, etc? That totally defeats the purpose of having this sweet 10 foot interface. So, as with everything else, there's always a way around this.
Cyberlink's Power DVD supports HD-DVD playback beautifully within vista. So, all that's required is to register the application with Media Center, and tell it that when a HD-DVD is inserted, launch PowerDVD in full screen mode. Easy! Just follow the documentation written up by Mike right here
I love when people figure out the tough stuff for me!
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2 comments:
How the hell did you pull that off, thats AWESOME. It's a shame you have to jump through hoops to use it, but Im interested to see just how good it looks. Until now, I've been skeptical, so I guess we will see. Looks like its coming right along. I think with the addition of the Harmony, I may be able to make a little harmony myself if you know what I mean;-) See you tomorrow!
There's not much to be skeptical about with HD-DVD or Blu Ray. It's full 1080i or 1080p resolution. The difference between 1080i/p and progressive scan 480p is drastic! I don't think we'll have a HD-DVD in house tomorrow to show it off for you, but who knows. It plays standard DVDs just fine, but nothing overly impressive.
Regarding the Harmony, you'll want to put it through a full battery of tests before turning it over. I had an issue with mine that seemed to be pretty common where it when the activity I was using required an input change on the TV, it would miss it by 1. In other words, if the activity called for the TV to be on Component 1, it would end up on the Video 4 input, missing that last input switch to Component 1. After digging around their support site, I found the solution was to change the timing variables in the advanced settings, letting it wait an extra beat between input switches. Needless to say, having the Mrs. press the "Watch DVD" activity on the remote and end up looking at a blank screen was not the desired goal!
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