Blu Ray from the HTPC

Sorry, but I had something I needed to deal with right away.
Impressing the women and audio video toys the same time…. It just can’t get any better than that! You must pick the right chicks! I’ll bet the CPU isn’t at 4% with all that going at the same time ; or possibly you have a quad of quads and your just hold out on me. I have one HTPC with a dual core 6600 and one with a quad 9450.
I used to be an engineer/programmer at Dell. Previous to that I owned a computer retail/consulting business. I know Dell isn’t known for quality and performance anymore but I just a grunt doing what I was told. LOL

LOL...Patrick..I had a singer over the other day...she loved the setup of course.

I get the 4% to 9% when only playing Blu Rays. The usage goes up considerably when I have a Blu Ray and a couple of standard movies playing at the same time. The PC starts to run out of steam once I play 1 Blu ray and more than 2 standard movies at the same time. Mainly it is running out of memory more than the processing power I think. I only have 3 GBs installed plus the 1 GB video card.

I was bored tonight, so a tested the system by playing 13 standard AVI movies simultaneously. CPU usage 17% to 27% and memory hovering around 52%. Those Quad cores are something serious! lol
I play a fair amount of movies directly from my hard drives that are converted from DVD to AVI format..

Nothing wrong with the Dells. I love my XPS 410 HTPC and the XPS 420 HTPC even more.
I have 3 of them in the house. Two HTPCs and a laptop. ;-)

Two of mine are a Dual core(laptop and secondary XPS 410 HTPC) and the other a Quad 6600(main HTPC XPS 420). I know it is the lowest on the Dell's Quad core totem poll, but still a beast for what I do with it.

Thanks for the link my friend!

A singer? Nice catch Gmood1.
Thats still excellent performance on th PC.
I want to rip the movies I have to the HD also but I just haven't quite gotten there yet. I'll need to add HD space if I want to place them all on the computer. About how much space per movies is it taking? What software did you use to rip the movies?
I also have a laptop top but I usually don't sa anything about it. It's a clunker by todays standards. I guess I'll to to update it one day.
Very happy to help. Let me know if you decide to go that route and how it works out.

You can compress the movie down to 700MB if you like. The quality isn't quite as good as DVD.But it is as good as Netflix instant downloads. Take it up to 1.2 gb or so and add dlby digital or DTS to the mix. Here's one converter mydvdtools. I use ConverterXtoDVD to convert them back to DVD.

From time to time I'll burn them back to hard disk and put 5 movies on one DVD 4.3 Gb disk.

You can get a heap of movies on HD if you convert and compress them a little. It is very easy to get 400 movies on a 500Gb HD doing it this way. I have so many movies on HD I have a hard time finding a particular one I want to watch sometimes! lol
I will certainly let you know how it goes.

Yeah.. she's just a backup singer at the moment for a friend of mine that is the lead singer of a band, that just completed some tracks on Shania Twain's new album that is in the works. Infact they were just in the studios a week or so ago.

I have been thinking about getting a HTPC with Blu-ray, but it's not clear to me how HTPC handles new audio format.

How do you decode and output TrueHD or new DTS-HD format on a HTPC to a receiver? Is it converted to Multi-ch PCM?