A Closer Look – Software
Given the rarity of Blu-Ray playback software, the included copy of PowerDVD 9 BD deserves some mention. A googling reveals that there are only a handful of companies with licences to produce Blu-Ray movie playback software. Sadly, none of them have produced a DirectShow filter that can plug into programs like Windows Media Player, so we’re stuck with their player software for now.
Using PowerDVD is, to be blunt, a big bag of hurt. For starters, the bundled version only decodes to 2 channel audio. If you want to actually listen to the surround sound tracks as they were intended, you have to fork over $100 for PowerDVD Ultra. The UI is, as you can see, a poorly-thought-out mess, with configuration options hid behind a clumsy series of dialog boxes. More damning, the program refused to respond to its own keyboard shortcuts. This meant that any operation, from pausing the movie on up, required fishing out the mouse and hitting the rather tiny control buttons across the bottom. Googling the problem provided no solutions or workarounds.
One misfeature that stands out by its sheer strangeness is PowerDVD’s intolerance to certain screen resolutions. I had my secondary monitor in portrait configuration, for web page reading, and PowerDVD threw a fit. It closed immediately, with the unhelpfully terse “This resolution not supported, PowerDVD will close now” message. Only after a fair bit of digging through support fora did I find the ultimate cause. PowerDVD refuses, whether by accident or by design, to run in any circumstance where any display on your system has a greater vertical resolution than horizontal. Mind you, PowerDVD was not running on the portrait-oriented display, it threw a fit because that display existed at all. The fix was simple enough: disable that display or change it back to portrait orientation. Still, if you happen to run an unusual display configuration, be forewarned.
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[…] Quote: Plextor is a familiar name to many, and they’ve built their reputation on exactly one thing: optical storage. It should be no surprise then, that they’ve extended their line to embrace the latest in high-density optical storage. Today we’ll be taking a look at the PX-B120U, a USB-bus-powered BD-ROM drive geared for movie playback. LINK: http://www.techwarelabs.com/plextor-px-b120u-bd-rom/ […]