Anyone who's read this blog for more than a week knows I'm a movie lover, and that I've been keeping an eye on the HD-DVD / Blu-ray format struggle (I'm not sure if it's a war; it seems more like one of those gaudy pro-wrestling matches where you shake your head at both sides). Out of curiosity, I did some digging to find out what I'd need to play HD content on my PC, in either format. What I found was not heartening.
- A Blu-ray or HD-DVD drive. This is the obvious part. Both types of drives are still new in the market, and still terribly expensive. Sony's first-out-the-gate Blu-ray burner/reader was about $750 at CompUSA last I checked.
- Blu-ray / HD-DVD titles. Well, I have one of each at this point, thanks to the good graces of some folks who helped me write an article on the format.
- A PCI Express graphics card with an HDCP-capable GPU, secure HDPC CryptoROM, and at least 256MB graphics memory. Now we're already in trouble. My PC supports AGP only -- it's a dual-AMD 64 model that was made before there was a PCI Express chipset to support that configuration. So unless someone out there has made an AGP edition of such cards (which so far I don't believe to be the case), I'm looking at a motherboard upgrade.
- Playback software that supports hardware decoding and acceleration, such as PowerDVD (my current favorite).
- A dual-core CPU with 1GB of RAM or better. Well, I already have that, but it looks like it's not going to be of much use without the GPU to go with it.
(Source)
I'm not mad enough to eat nails or anything like that over this, but it is terribly irritating. The idea of the general-use PC as being perpetually upgradeable hasn't been true for some time -- you're always going to run into some kind of wall when components reach the end of their lifetime -- but I had no idea it was going to happen this quickly. Maybe late next year I can look at upgrading ... maybe.
For now, there's always plain old DVD. Which, from what I can tell, isn't going anywhere for a long time either.
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