Saturday, June 18, 2011

Finally a free BD playback solution for Windows

6:52 PM / Blu-ray / Technology / Comments11 Comments

Blu-ray

I would urge everyone with a BD-ROM drive in their PC to check out DAPlayer, as far as I'm aware the first of its kind: a completely free playback solution for BDs. Oh, and it plays HD DVDs too.

It's a fairly rudimentary program and not without its problems. It doesn't support menus of any kind - either HDMV or BD-Java. Instead, it simply analyses the disc and then gives you what it determines to be the main title (as far as I can gather simply the longest item on the disc), though it does read playlists rather than individual .m2ts files, meaning that titles that use seamless branching work just fine. It also gives you access to a playlist menu so you can access bonus features, alternate cuts etc. Additionally, I found that the audio was noticeably out of sync on my system. This can easily be corrected using the "Delay +" and "Delay -" controls in the audio menu (a setting of -3 worked for me), but quitting the program causes it to forget which setting you specified. Furthermore, at least one disc I tried (THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE) suffered from severely jittery motion, while another (KINGDOM OF HEAVEN) wouldn't play at all.

Still, DAPlayer seems very promising. It's not clear from the web site whether development is ongoing and improvements can be expected, but if they can iron out the glitches I'd be more than happy to switch to it full-time, forsaking the reliable but somewhat clunky TotalMedia Theatre 3.

 
11 Comments

1. MCP said:

I am still completely un-expert with blue-rays, not having a BD player on my old PC, but... "the first completely free"... does this mean that standard Windows Media Player does NOT read/play BR discs?

On a side note, Media Player Classic - Home Theater guys have done a wonderful job in giving users DXVA acceleration with many AMD/nVidia chipsets and boards, thus allowing many kind of HD files to be played even on older hardware. I hope they'll be able to add BR discs playback, too.

(Posted on Saturday, June 18, 2011 at 8:29 PM)

2. Count Fosco said:

Is this software capable of playing blu-rays from any region?

(Posted on Saturday, June 18, 2011 at 9:20 PM)

3. Author Profile Page Michael said:

MCP:

That's correct. There is NO support for BD playback in Windows - it can recognise the disc itself, and software like Windows Media Player, Media Player Classic and VLC Media Player can play the .m2ts files contained on the disc PROVIDED you have a way of decrypting them (e.g. SlySoft's AnyDVD HD), but no, you can't just pop a BD into the drive and have Windows play it. Native BD playback is #1 on my list of dream features to be included with the next version of Windows.


Count:

I don't think so - you need to find another way round the region code (like, again, AnyDVD HD). Also, judging from this post, AnyDVD HD may be needed anyway to play recent titles as, and I quote, "it looks like they support newer titles on a month-by-month release schedule". Certainly I couldn't get either THE SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS MOVIE or LEGEND to play if I turned of AnyDVD HD. So this definitely isn't the be-all and end-all solution to BD playback on a PC. But it IS free, and it IS a start...

(Posted on Saturday, June 18, 2011 at 9:25 PM)

4. MCP said:

@Michael: Wow, that sounds incredible, in a way... but then, if I remember correctly, Win98, 2000 and XP did not have any real DVD video support, meaning you could not play mpeg2 files without a third party software.

Maybe XP bypassed this limitation with recent releases of Media Player, from a certain version onward, but I'm not so sure about that.

(Posted on Saturday, June 18, 2011 at 9:43 PM)

5. David Mackenzie said:

I'd be surprised if this player obeyed region locking, considering it doesn't even implement most of the BD Spec - all it seems to do is load clips (the files you see in the BDMV\STREAM folder on the disc) and playlists.

As far as I'm aware, the only way to add region locking on a BD title is to actually program a "If the player is the wrong region, go to an infinite loop" behaviour at the start of the disc, which should get bypassed by this thing.

I could be wrong of course.

(Posted on Saturday, June 18, 2011 at 9:54 PM)

6. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Just checked. It ignores the region code. However, finding a Region B title that would actually play took a while - eventually I hit upon the Momentum release of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, but that was only after running through half a dozen B-locked titles.

(Posted on Saturday, June 18, 2011 at 10:07 PM)

7. Kentai said:

I've been using "Media Player Classic - Home Cinema" for at least a year now. It's freeware and supports subtitles and all DVD/BD related audio-video codecs. It plays AVI/MKV and whatever else you throw at it too, and allows you to use third party decoders with it as a sort of front-end (such as FFDShow). I actually have FFDShow running as my current decoder, since letting MPC-HD handle it via hardware support distorts the aspect ratio slightly for some reason.

Frustratingly, it'll only play the individual M2TS "Stream" files, not playlists. It also won't playback encrypted content without AnyDVDHD or a similar AACS-cracking middle-man, but it sounds like DAPlayer is about the same...

Still, this could be a handy tool. Thanks for mentioning it.

(Posted on Sunday, June 19, 2011 at 3:35 AM)

8. Trond said:

While a free software BD player is always welcome, I don't see why it's such a big deal to spend a little money on one of the commercial programs available. If you're regularly buying BDs, it's just a matter of prioritizing and skipping a few. ArcSoft often run campaigns on TMT, so you don't necessarily have to spend $100+. Even so, IMHO, it's money well spent. I've bought the latest versions of both TMT and PowerDVD (one for each of my HTPCs, as I wanted to test both), and I've never had any issues with them. In fact I'm very satisfied indeed. And what's even better, there are various simple ways of rendering both regionfree (not AnyDVD, which I don't really care for).

(Posted on Sunday, June 19, 2011 at 7:01 PM)

9. Paku said:

Might try it out later, but for now I am content with AnyDVD HD + PowerDVD 7. The only problem I have is that 4 versions of the player later, they still can't decode 96kHz audio tracks properly, but thankfully I only have one such disc.

I am actually running a slightly modified PDVD7, using some audio decoder .dlls from a later version (10 I think, because the ones in the last couple of patches for 7 were messed up) and it works without issue, proof that after several $100 updates, the core player hasn't changed much.

(Posted on Sunday, June 19, 2011 at 10:52 PM)

10. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Trond:

I don't mind paying for decent software, and admittedly TotalMedia Theatre IS pretty decent, though not without its flaws. Like both PowerDVD and WinDVD, I find it clunky and rather bloated, and I've got half a dozen discs that won't play - they just crash when I hit "Play" from the main menu. More annoyingly, all the paid-for solutions I've come across insist on using the now largely defunct hardware overlay, which completely ignores desktop-based colour management and means that, when like me you have a monitor with no controls beyond backlight and on/off, there's no way to actually calibrate the video beyond the incredibly rudimentary solution ArcSoft have implemented (which is disabled when you use hardware acceleration). I like the fact that DAPlayer (like VLC, Media Player Classic and Windows Media Player) uses the EVR to render playback, which conforms to your desktop colour settings.


Paku:

It certainly doesn't help that each subsequent version of PowerDVD seems to get slower and clunkier than the last. I stuck with PowerDVD 3 for years because it was lightning fast compared to anything that came after it, until it got to the stage where they stopped supporting it and it became incredibly temperamental with newer discs.

(Posted on Monday, June 20, 2011 at 10:15 PM)

11. MCP said:

Bought PowerDVD out of fidelity -I used earlier versions alot years ago- but I miss the old, small interface that was. Now it's glossier and nice to see but advanced options are not easily set (try to switch hardware acceleration on the fly...) and everything is a bit bloatware.

MPC-HC, on the other side, has worse controls for navigating DVD menus (using mouse to click on screen links is often a nightmare for me: I have to try and try until I catch them) and its filter, codec and option chains can be tricky, but it's far more versatile and I use it more often. It's even possible to have multiple versions installed in different folders, with different settings each: sometimes 1.3 plays files that 1.4 can not.

My ideal would be a sort of mix/sum of MPC and old style PDVD - and no, so far I haven't appreciated Videolan as I expected I would: I think its interface is complex even when it tries to stay simple.

(Posted on Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 12:13 AM)

 
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