Yesterday a new drive for my HTPC arrived. An LG HD DVD/Blu-Ray optical drive! I got this through a 1 day deal for $120. What surprised me when it arrived is it was a Retail package! I figured it would be a bare drive/OEM version. So I installed it, threw in the CD that came with it and it had PowerDVD 7 Ultra included! Woot! The nice thing for me is that 7 supports HD DVD. They pulled it out in 8. So I fired up my first Blu-Ray, The Simpsons Movie (courtesy of Blockbuster Online). It played great, but my screen was flickering really bad. It just didn't seem right. So I threw in an HD DVD. It gave me an error about being hooked up to an HDMI repeater (my receiver I guess). So I downloaded the trial of AnyDVD HD and while I was at it rolled back to an older video driver. After a reboot the same results with the BD. I popped a HD DVD back in and it played perfectly (with AnyDVD). So I rolled back to another driver version. This time the BD played flawlessly! What's awesome is my system was only using around 10-20% CPU during playback!

So I guess now I can start buying BD's. It's going to hurt going to their sticker prices from HD DVD's!


In other news my server crashed again last night. It looks like one of the drives failed. Again. Fortunately last time I set it up I did so as RAID 1, so there was a backup drive. It rebuilt the first drive again overnight. Hopefully it doesn't fail again. Although the system is reporting a different drive failure. I'll have to shut it down sometime and check that out.

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