Blu-ray: Amadeus

So one of my Blu-ray movie orders came through yesterday: Amadeus. I could not wait to see the PQ and have the Blu-ray experience on my HTPC... so I duly put the disc in the new Liteon BD-ROM drive... and disappointedly, found PowerDVD9 Deluxe edition could not play the disc!

PowerDVD wanted me to upgrade to the Ultra edition, which support Blu-ray playback! Well what a pain. So instead of this, I downloaded a trial version of PowerDVD9 to try out the Blu-ray playback. Unfortunately, more problems as the software complained about needing to update now and again to be able to play Blu-ray movies! You then accept this and allow PowerDVD to update, but nothing happens and you are returned to the same prompt of updating when you press play again! Arggghhh!!

A Google revealled that this is a known bug in PowerDVD, and a solution can be found using AnyDVD. Fortunately, you are able to download a trial version of AnyDVD, and I so did. Trying it out seems to work - but then after 10 mins or so of Amadeus playback froze my HTPC!!! Arrrrrgggghhhh! Worst still, after a hard powercycle of the PC, it refused to come back, freezing on boot after the Windows logo on a blue screen! Oh no! I tried several hard powercycle and this occured each time... I then had enough and switch everything off and went to bed!

Today, I got up and powered on the HTPC, and it seems OK, getting passed the frozen blue screen achieved yesterday, and it booted into Windows OK. I did not try to do anything else on the PC before heading off to work - hopefully everything is OK with the box.

Conclusion: first Blu-ray experience: very poor. I was not too impressed with the PQ of Amadeus - what little of it I saw, either... :(