A Closer Look
The iHOS104 came with a set of standard essentials: instructions manual, installation disk, and a SATA cable. Interestingly enough, the drive will be recognized by windows 7 as a standard Blu-Ray drive, however, you will not be able to play Blu-Ray movies unless you have the software that is included in the disk as there are no free decoders for the Blu-Ray formats.
The drive comes with the standard black faceplate as can be seen in the picture above or a silver one which can be installed to adapt the look of the drive to the look of the case. On top of the drive bezel there are DVD ROM, Blu-Ray and CD emblems embedded in to the plastic drive faceplate.
Bundled Software
LITE-ON iHOS104 came bundled with CyberLink Blu-Ray Advisor which scans your system to determine if it will be able to handle the Blu-Ray playback as well as the interactive content such as BD Live and Bonus View that comes with in the later standards of Blu-Ray disks. CyberLink indicated that this particular player is not compatible with the interactive content that comes with the BD Disks. CyberLink also thought that the graphics card – ATI Radeon 4870 and the Core i7 are also not BD Ready.
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Following the updates, the evaluation software decided to re-evaluate my computer to determine if I am more capable of playing Blu-Ray titles. The Advisor has now determined that I am not BD Live and Bonus View capable. It also appears that the software has detected that I am using a mirror driver for a remote desktop client I am using: VNC. Unable to recognize it, the software has determined that it might be detrimental to the playback of the Blu-Ray Disks.
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Ignoring the fact that the software thought that the ATI Raden HD 4870 was an incapable graphics card, I proceed to the next section, which was the testing of the drive itself.
It would have been nicer to test the drive with a more htpc oriented CPU (core i3 and athlon 2) and test how does the BD playback affect the system resources (mem and CPU usage)