Oh, and my monitor is an HDCP-compliant 24 inch Dell LCD, so no worries there hopefully.

I've seen a ton of Blu-ray and HD-DVD rips available on BitTorrent.

Oh kewl, AnyDVD *can* copy an ACCS bluray m2ts file to a hard drive. It's Rattling and Humming right now. I wonder if its ironic that AnyDVD originates in Ireland... "Fuck The Revolution!" woohoo. [That's Bono from the track "Sunday Bloody Sunday"].

You know, there's always something... I'm watching 2 grainy movies on HD-DVD & Bluray (Daylight & U2-Rattle & Hum) on the computer now (24" 1920x1200 LCD). You have to set the 24" to be the primary on the dual-head otherwise PowerDVD picks the wrong resolution for full-screen mode. Anyway, these are maybe the 2 grainiest movies on the two technologies... Yuck. The Matrix Reoloaded looked and sounded great on the computer.

Hm, Media Player seems to be dog-crap no matter what version of windows or the player you use. (I just tried Vista 64 with Media Player 11). PowerDVD (and Real Player) both work fine. Linux X didn't take well to the dual-head stuff on the new video card. More pain. Linux XINE barfed on the MJPEG but "Movie Player" handled it just fine.

By the by, PowerDVD can play my Canon TX-1 videos (MJPEG?) (1/2 HD: 1280x768) on one core while picasa sniffs around for new photos and creates thumbnails on another core all the time letting me write crap like this on the other head of the video card (its a bit weird having one CRT and one LCD). Anyway, the HD-DVD and Blu-ray playback does not take kindly to moving from monitor to the other. I think its something with HDCP settings (you may need an LCD monitor that provides this). This is with de-interlace turned on for HD. PowerDVD is okay with it, but on XP-64, Windows Media player falls out of sync (appears to be a bug). I guess I reboot into Vista-64 and try some more tests. So add a couple of 1920x1080 HDCP LCD monitors to the upgrade list if you want this combo drive.

I went out and bought the drive. A couple of points of note, my Nvidia 6600 was obsolete after only 2 years and had to be replaced to be able to play HD-DVD & BluRay movies (I went for an ATI HD3870 chipset, because despite the 75% decline in AMD stock price, I'm still a bit of a fanboy, at least for a few more months anyway). The video card driver installation was a bit long (I run 4 operating systems on the one box).

Also the drive itself is SATA, so you better have an up-to-date system for all of this (mine is 2 years old, but has PCI-E, SATA and such.).The drive comes with the latest PowerDVD (which has to update itself and the drive before it can play "Transformers" in HD-DVD), but can play HD. PowerDVD did an okay job with my HD videos shot on my Canon TX-1.At the moment under XP-32 Transformers is utilizing under 20% of one core of the CPU (all the HD-DVD decoding is on the GPU).

Yeah, I saw that drive and almost bought it. I feel left out now that ACCS has been broken both on HD-DVD and Blu-ray and I haven't got a ripper of my own yet.

Anyway, all that optical media is nearly obsolete out of the gate. I would do my OS backup onto an outboard hard drive...

Copying 100 pirated shows onto DVDs is a total waste of time. I would trade 50 buck hard drives if I had any sort of interest in that kind of thing. For the record, I generally don't like recent North American movies. Their MPAA is totally out of control.

I absolutely do not see why a film depicting stuff like "Unbearable lightness of Being" (USA:R) usually garners USA:NC-17 with no explanation to independant film makers (and thus NO distribution posibility), and Bruce Willis shooting himself in "Live Free or Die Hard" gets (USA:PG-13)

Anyway, it's a big "whatever..." to me. As Michael Moore said best in "Sicko": "Who are we???"

Now where was I, oh yes, after all that, if it is legal in your neck of the woods, I think it would be tres cool to have an HD/Blue ray combo drive and rip all my legally purchased movies to a single 1TB drive so I could play clips when guests come over.

Speaking of tres cool, I really liked the Qubecois grammar lesson in vulgar French expressions in the HD version of "Bon Cop, Bad Cop (2006)". (13+ Canada) and ... USA:UNRATED. You can bet your ass its unrated. It's a frickin' international incident waiting to happen. What a hoot.

oooo... "UNRATED".... I'm sooo scared.