Just wondering, I haven't thought about it much but blu ray, even at low speeds uses lots of MB per second. I can only imagine that 8x and above on blu ray would require massive MB/s from the hard drive.

Am I just confused or would it be possible for Blu ray to be too fast for the standard current hard drive when it hits speeds about 8x or higher?

4x blu ray is already close to the maximum speed of current DVDRW drives @ 16x. 8x on Blu Ray would spit out a massive 36MB/s.

A couple of points. First off, blue ray is kind of a high performance format right now, and may require high performance equipment to support it. I have been looking into a new video card for my htpc, and while I am not running hidef yet, I am taking it into account when choosing a card (planning ahead kind of thing). I have been reading a lot about it, and was suprized to find out the massive amount of power it takes just to play a blue ray disk. Even on an e6600, just playing a blue ray disk can take 60% average cpu power (85% max) or more. the good news is that there are video cards (only a few) that can do all the processing and drop that to 20% usage. HD takes power!!!!

Second, I think that hard drives are faster than you think, and getting faster. Burning only requires sequential reading (if you are working of a well defragged second drive) and drives are pretty fast at sequential reading. Even if you have to do a little random reading, thats what buffers are for. If you look at the pic that shows the hard drive speed info, the c drive is a plane jane 7200 rpm maxtor (that is a few years old an actually a refurb warranty replacement). Nero benches it at about 56MBps. If thats not enough, look at drive e. It is a 3 drive raid, using an inexpensive 939 abit motherboard's raid, and 3 plane jane 7200rpm drives (cannot remember if those are hitachi's or segate's).
http://club.cdfreaks.com/attachment....hmentid=102199
Nero benches it at about 123MBps, and looking at the last pic, nero estimates that the 3 drive array is fast enough to do 80.5x speed dvd burning!!!!
http://club.cdfreaks.com/attachment....hmentid=102200
If I recall right, someone with one of the newest perpendicular technology seagate's got something like 65-70MBps off a single drive. I'm not saying that you wont get into trouble or have problems. If it your boot drive, and other programs including your burn software are having to access the drive at the same time, and or if it is very fragmented, and or if you have a slow controller (it matters as much as the drive does), or who knows what else, a single 7200rpm drive might not be fast enough, but its not to hard or expensive to get the speed you need (it not exotic, expensive equipment or anything).

Interesting, so CPU usage is pretty much more of a factor than HDD it seems.

I have an AMD 2600+ from years ago. Does everything fine at the moment, but if a 6600 uses up to 60% CPU usage, I'd definitely eventually need a new system wouldn't I?

Mind you my graphics card is verrrry old and it was slow back from when I first got it..

The cpu problem is for playback as it takes that much power to decode the compression on the fly so to speak. Of course if you get a drive, you are going to want to be able to play as well as burn. Like I said though, there are new video cards that fully process the the decoding and there are cheap ones. I'm not sure what class of cpu you have (athlon xp, athlon 64 etc), but it might be able to do it with the right video card (one of the reviews I read managed just fine with a pentium 4 with one of these cards). The only cards that will do full processing are ati 2400 and 2600's (you can get a 2400 for about 45$ on newegg right now) and the nivida 8500/8600. Its not how powerfull the card is, its specific technology that is only on the specific model cards I listed. You might notice in the graphic, that it was a hd2900 xt that was using that much power for playback (a much faster card than the 2400 or 2600, but lacking the full HD decoding technology).

It took some digging, but here is the review that shows tests with a pentium 4, both with and without the above video cards.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3047&p=1
It would seem that with these cards, the pentium 4 had no problems at all playing HD (10-30% average cpu usage depending on the test), but without one of the above cards, the pentium 4 choked and died.

Fyi, I did read something about an agp 2400 possibly coming out. What are your system specs by the way (just curious how old is old)?

There is one other thing I forgot to mention. There are three codec approved for use with blueray and hd-dvd, VC-1, H.264, and MPEG-2. Further, If I am not mistaken, for tv broadcast in the US at least, VC-1, H.264 are approved. H.264 is the mean one that takes all kinds of power like 60% cpu on an e6600. VC-1 takes a lot less power but it still takes a chunk of power. The two ati cards fully hardware process both VC-1 and H.264 and have very low cpu usage on both. The nvidia cards only fully process H.264 though they do seem to be optimized a bit better than ati for VC-1 with partial hardware processing.
In other words, with VC-1, the two ati cards have very low cpu usage (often less than 10%) because they are fully hardware processed. With nvidia, VC-1 is not fully hardware processed on any invida card but since VC-1 takes less power It only takes about 20-25% cpu power on a conroe or similar. The ati cards that do not fully process VC-1 (the hd2900 and many of the x1000 series) take even more with 30% or more cpu usage. It you have an old, slower cpu, the ati cards (2400/2600) are the safe bet. It might work and play fine with the nvidia cards, but your cpu usage is likely to be pretty high (and if it is a really old class of processor, maybe too high). Thats one of the reasons that I decided to get an ati card. I'll be using an athlon 64 3000 (my conroe's MB wont support enough pata and sata hard drives and I have lots of smaller drives). Further, I think that the ati fully hardware process mpeg-2 and some avi, where nvidia doesn't (that one I'm not 100% sure on but I read that at least one place). I think nvidia thinks these formats dont need enough power to need to fully hardware processing from the video card. Personally, even if the cpu can handle it, I would still rather the vid card take the burden off the cpu like the ati's do. On the flip side, if you are a serious gamer and have a fast cpu, the nvidia 8500/8600 are a little bit better gaming cards, so its kind of a trade off.

The funny thing is, I didn't know anything about this a week ago (I have spent hours and hours reading on it and believe me, there is a lot of info out there). fortunately or unfortunately (easier decisions but less options), for hd playback, there are only the 4 options, ati 2400/2600 and nvidia 8500/8600. Several other cards from both claim to have hardware processing for hd, but it is not full hardware processing, and it makes a difference, a huge difference with H.264.

ripit,

the HD 2900 series has no OVD enabled like the HD 2400 and 2600 cards have.
That means: no accelleration like with the 2400/2600 cards!!!

The nvidia cards have not all that hardware accelleration features that the ATI/AMD cards have.

Make your choice.

I already decided on the 2600xt. I'm not sure what memory though (probably depends on what I find a good price on). If video including HD is your main priority, it seems to be the best you can get.

How old is old? Hehe we're talking quite a few years now.

AMD 2600+ barton core
1GB DDR400 Ram
Asus A7N8X deluxe
graphics card is a pissy 64MB one (I never play games)

Hmm did I miss anything??? I got loads of HDD space, about 600GB worth.

I'm thinking of upgrading sometime in the future to a quad core, 2GB RAM, one of those ASUS mobos (my friend recommended them, good for overclocking too) etc. But yeah, dunno which graphics card to go with.

But I'll have a PS3 before a new PC I think, so I won't use my PC much for blu ray playback, ill use the PS3.

Thanks for all the info

cd pirate,

if you want to doanything with HD formats, then grab a HD 2600xt card.

Thanks chef, will do

Just fyi, For HD playback only, with H.264/AVC and VC-1 (the two main HD formats, with H.264/AVC being the really ugly one for massive power usage), if you are on a tight budget, the 2400pro/xt will reduce cpu usage just as much as the 2600xt (and the 2400's will still beat the nvidia cards when it comes to cpu usage).

There are defanate advantages to the 2600xt over the 2400's, but as far as power and ability to play HD, they both have the unified video decoder and both will play HD fine without power problems.
A few of the differences between the two. for video formats that do not have full hardware processing and or use different parts of the vid card for processing (the unified video decoder only does the two HD formats), as well as general computer tasks, games, and overall performance, the 2600xt is a little more than twice as powerful as the 2400's. Further, there is a test for HD that is supposed to judge picture quality called the HQV Benchmark. I have seen several reviews use this. It is subjective as it requires the reviewer to look at screen shots, compare them to standard ones, and judge the difference. Different people are going to have different eye site and judge differently. Still, every review rated the 2600 higher (some only a little higher, some a lot higher). The 2600xt scored between 80-90 out of 100 for Hd picture quality, while the 2400's scored between 60-75 out of 100. the 2400's are by no means bad (according to some reviewers), and are decent for a tight budget, but as far as I'm concerned, if you can afford the 2600xt, the extra cost seems to be well worth spending. Also, the 2400's are memory speed/bandwith crippled compared to the 2600xt which always hurts overall performance a bit.
I chose to get the 2600xt (even though it is a bit more than I wanted to spend), because the price difference is well justified, and I think it will last a lot longer till it needs to be upgraded due to much greater overall power, but if you are on a tight budget, the 2400's work fine power wise with HD.

ripit,
you've come a long way in a short time, wow!

this thread and your other one have really opened my eyes

All I knew was 720p mkv h264 files would be unplayable on an older computer and barely playable on my amd64 with radeon 9600 gt

now the xbox 360 and apple tv blow them away

I tend to go all out when it comes to researching a new computer part purchase (If I got paid for the hours I have spent reading, I could probably buy 2 cards with the money). The only bad thing is I sometime go overboard, get frustrated if I cannot find a clear best product, and give up for a while. Luckily, with only a few cards with full hardware Hd processing to chose from, this was a pretty easy decision. I also like the fact that after words, I am more knowledgeable about the product. For instance (and I should have mentioned this), there are only a couple of compatible softwares with hd hardware processing (windvd, power dvd and nero showtime), and on top of that, hardware processing is disabled by default. You have to enable it in the player (and maybe in the vid card software), or you don't even get the advantage of these cards.

Both of those devices do not have as good standards support for AVC encoded content as PC, and both do not like MKV container format.

I have heard different, I wanted to do a test on a friends xbox 360 but I only had a pal mkv, another friend is reprogramming his apple tv(160gig) after he gets the adapter to load the os/x lite on it.

Apple TV doesnt know HDTV (yet).

Just curious, by apple tv, you are talking about a mac with good video capabilities right, or is there some special apple Hd device?

A special designed Apple device, tho is only PC components in disguise

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_TV

http://www.apple.com/appletv/specs.html

minature computer, seems a hacker's delight, wonder if my buddy(mac user) will ever get his hacked

There was a discussion at doom9.org with Microsoft engineers discussing the update for Xbox 360, it is limited to MP4 container format for AVC content with only 2 channel AAC-LC audio.

Very few commercial devices support opensource codec/formats like OGM/MKV/FLAC or allow full support of all encoding options in popular video codecs.