Any hope for Bluray?

[bobwhiting]

I have Windows 7 with Windows Media Center. It works great and has been for more than a year. My HTPC runs on an AMD ASUS board with a 3.9 GHz quad core, solid state drive and 3/4 TB disk. I recently tried adding an ASUS bluray player and PowerDVD 13 Ultra. Power DVD really messed up the playing of standard DVDs. Power DVD also fit in very poorly with overlapping menus and very clumsy control. Horrible standard playback and poor bluray playback. I do not want to spend my days trying to get this expensive addition working. Just removed PowerDVD and MCE went back to normal for standard DVDs. I would prefer a CODEC in MCE but any truly working solution would be appreciated. Microsoft just has the normal chant: No Bluray. Other than just saying no to Bluray, is there any place for help?

[STC]

TotalMedia Theatre
http://www.arcsoft.com/totalmedia-theatre/

Although I have now moved to a stand-alone BDP and just leave MC to the task of recording TV and playing it back.

[adam1991]

Indeed. The right tool for the job.

Funny thing--I'm watching Cutthroat Kitchen right now, and one of the auctions was for a Swiss Army knife to replace all of someone's knives. Guess what--a Swiss Army knife can't replace professional chef's knives.

[crawfish]

It's amazing these paid programs continue to exist at high prices yet just get worse and worse. After buying each of PowerDVD, TMT, and WinDVD in 2006-2008, I vowed never to even download any such program ever again and use a standalone BD player for physical disks. After Microsoft married WMC to the new "Library" concept and derped the music library in Windows 7 circa 2009, I abandoned WMC for everything except DVR purposes. Now I use XBMC for all other library-based video playback. It is iTunes for library-based music playback. The default players, the ones that run when I double-click files in Explorer, are PotPlayer for video and foobar2000 for music. Life is good this way.

[barnabas1969]

Hmmm... I like TMT 5 better than any BD player I've ever owned.

[Ed]

If I had to use a BR player in WMC I'd use TMT (and I did); so if you're dead set on that, I'd recommend it. Like others have suggested though, I would recommend a stand alone BR player more so. You don't need a top of the line one - but if you don't want a slow one avoid bottom of the barrel ones as well.

[newfiend]

+1 for TMT if you want it in WMC.

[woodchuck]

+1 for going for a standalone Bluray. I have TMT, and it's WAF can be spotty at times. The Bluray hardware player works more reliably, IMO.

[mcewinter]

Welcome to The Green Button. Push the input button.

Seriously though, TMT rules.

[bobwhiting]

Thanks for the help. The reason I want Bluray on the media center is the player I have stinks. It's slow and quirky, however it seems to play all Bluray. I'll look into TMT.

[GACSALY]

I use TMT and ANYDVD with MCE.
Works very well.
ANYDVD can auto remove previews and reduces copy protection issues.
I don't want any more boxes and I like the more consistent user interface of the MCE integration.