I got an Optiarc (Sony) BD drive for $89. Added it to my Vista Media Center and works fine. Unfortunately, Blu-Ray playback is not integrated into Vista MCE. Besides that, picture quality is great.
@acme xbmc is a great media center, but it does not do hardware accelerated video on any platform (yet). So it is only good for 1080 playback if you have a really beefy CPU ( > 3ghz dual core intel or maybe now the phenom 2 overclocked). For 720P you can get away with any mid range CPU. xbmc uses ffmpeg for its decoding and it is all software based at the moment. Oddly, the best shot at hardware accelerated video in xbmc right now is on Linux with Nvidia graphics, which is under development.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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I got an Optiarc (Sony) BD drive for $89. Added it to my Vista Media Center and works fine. Unfortunately, Blu-Ray playback is not integrated into Vista MCE. Besides that, picture quality is great.
you should try some third party solutions like xbmc
@acme
xbmc is a great media center, but it does not do hardware accelerated video on any platform (yet). So it is only good for 1080 playback if you have a really beefy CPU ( > 3ghz dual core intel or maybe now the phenom 2 overclocked). For 720P you can get away with any mid range CPU. xbmc uses ffmpeg for its decoding and it is all software based at the moment. Oddly, the best shot at hardware accelerated video in xbmc right now is on Linux with Nvidia graphics, which is under development.