The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

I never thought Liteon stuff was that great tbh, it always seemed a bit cheap, and I know a long time back they used to have a few issues. I've stuck with LG for the last few years without any incidents. I usually stick with Verbatim for media as you can find it in physical stores and it's fairly decent. However, never buy Verbatim CD-Rs, as you stand the highest chance of coasters with Verbatim compared with any other brand, including the budget no-names.

 

I had a VERY good lite-on drive once. LH-20A1H. I currently still have the Sata counterpart. LH-20A1S. It's also pretty good. They seem to read discs that are wayyy less than perfect. My Optiarc 7200S is about as good a reader. Definitely excellent burners! Can't wait for the comparable BD drive. The LG drives seem really good though(minus LTH media). I wouldn't say all verbatim is good. Never tried their CD's. But DVD's with the right Dyes are almost as good as Taiyo Yuden media. But Verbatim is currently using a cheaper dye one should watch out for!

Now, to find some things that are valuable to sell! Must have that 1090t LOL!!!

 

Sammy said something about plenty of free bluray softwares out there? I did try to look for frebbies and could not find any, cause cyber powerdvd for blurays sure as hell doesn't work.

 

MPCHC will read a bluray folder. I prefer TMT3 or TMT5(Not free) though

 

K-Lite Standard Codec Pack with Media Player Classic Home Cinema plays BDs fine in my experience.

 

Also, VLC, heck even Windows Media Player will play Blu-Ray. My favorite is Media Player Classic, although I don't use any Codecs with it.

 

Same here, I don't find codec packs necessary with MPCHC any more.

 

I have VLC, I have Gom and several other frebbies, none wotk with bluray.

 

K-Lite has a way of mucking up certain installs/programs. FFdshow and Haali are all I ever need

 

Sam,

I use PowerDVD 12. It plays everything and has the best rendering engine I've ever seen. You can't tell 1080i from 1080p. They look identical in quality. Lower resolutions like 720p are scaled to the screen, by the aspect ratio, be it at 16x9 or 16x10. Even at 16x10, you lose about an inch of width, but the picture scales so perfectly that it looks stunning and clear. However it does it, it seems to give the best possible resolution, and it seems to do it automatically. I bought it on sale for $35.49, last week. I saved about $25.

Russ

 

There is a bunch of free programs that can play BD movies and DVDFab even has a free version to rip movies, at least I think it will do Blu-ray too in the free version. VLC is one of the many players that can play just about anything but again there are more.

LiteOn drives used to be some of the better drives even though you could get them cheap and they could rip certain formats that other drives had problems with i.e., old Sony burners. I use to swear by LiteOnIt but about the time they stopped providing a easy to find firmware site is the time they started to go down hill. That is about the time the tray eject started to be a problem too.

I mostly use TMT too as my movie player of choice but I like VLC because I can take snap shots of a movie with it where TMT does not allow that anymore.

If I didn't just buy the Sky Caddie SGX GPS for $247 shipped, I would have taken a chance on the LiteOn Blu-ray Jeff is considering since at that price you probably can't go wrong, probably, but it is a gamble of course.

I won't install any Cyberlink crap on my PC's since I learned my lesson with them years ago.

 

Russ, what do you mean you lose an inch of width? You shouldn't lose anything :S

On a 16:10 monitor, you simply see more black on top and bottom.

 

If that is the case, then it's a low quality source. It's a technical impossibility for 1080i to offer the same image quality as 1080p, because half the detail simply isn't there. You can get good de-interlacing but it will never provide quite the same picture as a proper 1080p rip. Usually this is good enough, because the sorts of content that are 1080i native are from TV source rather than from blurays, and thus start out as compressed content to begin with.
Nothing is lost by using a 16:10 display, the picture is not stretched to fit unless you set it to be. You would only lose out if you tried to play something 16:10 on a 16:9 display, but since no video formats are that aspect ratio, it's a non-issue.

 

I agree about that Cyberlink crap, I still think it's somekind of software or player problem with this liteon, like I said, anything to do with regular cd's or dvd's everything works perfect reading and writing, just will not load up anything bluray, is it the software, or the optical drive itself, do not know and can't figure it out, so my bluray experiance went south.

 

VLC works fine for me for Bly-Ray. It is also one of my favorites that I use.

 

Yes they do.

He should lose height not width. 16x9 vs. 16x10... width is the same.

 

I'm planning on getting a bluray drive in the next few months, so we'll see then

 

Ahh, I thought you didn't like optical drives

I've got three of um! LOL! One's going south though

 

I don't dislike optical drives, I just see no reason to have any more than two (for on-the-fly copying). My current supermulti is scarcely used, but being able to burn blurays that will play in PS3s will be handy.

 

Yah, I've dropped back quite a bit myself. I don't see the need for more than 2 DVD drives, and the three BD drives. One BD drive is new, the other LG is questionable now, and the Lite-on is my scanner. I don't burn DVD's in them. It's a waste of potential if you ask me So as you see, I do have legitimate reasons LOL!