Blu-Ray and PowerDVD 8

Of late, Technology has been progressing in leaps and bounds and the Quality of Video files and formats have also been making tremendous progress. The Compact Disk [CD] was the first to come out after the VHS/Video Cassettes era that lasted decades. It brought along with it the MPEGAV format. For a long time this was the industry standard for creating Video CDs until the advent of the Digital Versatile Disk [DVD] happened. With typical data rates in the range of 3-10 Mbps, video stored at a resolution of 720×480 and audio in a very efficient 24-bits/96 kHz format with monaural to 7.1 channels "Surround Sound" DVDs stood the test of time and were said to have been showcasing the best in Movie Quality. A 3 hour Regional Language movie would easily use up about 4.5 Gigs of space on the Disk and was split into files of 0.99GB each. A Single Layer DVD could hold about 4.7GB of data while a Dual Layer DVD held double that at about 8.5 GB. However, the Human thirst to improve quality from Good to Better to Best as we all know is Insatiable. We now have the Blu-Ray Disks [BD] to look out for that seem to be the ultimate in High Definition. BD-Video movies have a whopping maximum data transfer rate of 54 Mbps, a maximum AV bitrate of 48 Mbps (for both audio and video data). They are normally stored on Blu-ray ROM discs with up to 1920x1080 pixel resolution. A Single Layer BD-R can hold about 25GB of data while a Dual Layer Disk would easily accommodate about 50GB. There was a time in the not so recent past when I used to tote a 20GB Seagate Internal IDE HDD for data transfer and found it to be very cumbersome, not to forget very delicate, and today take a look at what we have……… A Mini- Frisbee disk that can hold data the equivalent of upto 70 CDs!!! Phew…..

In keeping abreast with the Technology improvements that were being made in the field of Digital and High-Def Video, I went ahead and downloaded a file that was said to contain extra content from the recent Anime Block-buster movie……..WALL-E. It was a relatively small video [7.5 mins to be precise] and which to my dismay was about 350 MB in size. The file had a “.mkv” extension on it and hoping that I might at last be able to play a High-Def movie on my 20inch Dell monitor for the 1st time, powered up PowerDVD 8 Ultra and dragged and dropped this file over into the application. There was this hour-glass against the mouse pointer for about 20-30 secs and the screen went blank!!! Presuming that every movie began this way, I scrolled forward for a bit, yet the result was the same L……….. Audio was fine though. Dejected, I looked up Forums and FAQs at Cyberlink’s own webpage found that Cyberlink in order to prevent Piracy only allowed us to play a BDROM movie straight off the Disk and not as individual files of the “.mkv” extension. Some of the Forums also mentioned that there is a certain application called CCCP (Combined Community Codec Pack) that needed to be installed first. So I religiosuly went ahead and downloaded the pack from here:-

In this installation as well, the most important component happens to be something called the Haali Media Splitter. Once this is installed, all you would have to do is to rename the BluRay Video file with a “.avi” extension as against the original “.mkv” extension. Drag n Drop the file into PowerDVD 8 Ultra and Voila…….Crystal clear Video and Audio. Shown below are some of the Screenshots I took from the movie. ;-)

You could also play these files with the player called “Media Player Classic Homecinema” that comes built in with the CCCP pack, but, the only catch being that you would not be utilizing the enhanced Hardware Acceleration of Playback Video that is provided by the PowerDVD 8 application and of course some enhanced features in Audio Playback as well.

Happy Viewing!!!