The Trouble with Home Theater PCs November 28, 2007 Alan Dang

The Trouble with HTPCs

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…Things were different for DVD. When DVDs first came out, there was no question that DVDs offered a significant leap in performance over Laserdisc or VHS movies. In the early days, DVD players reached into the $1000 price point. With PC DVD solutions (such as Creative Labs’s DXR and DXR2 technologies) being $500 or less, PC DVDs were a great way to get started. As computational horsepower increased and DVDs became more mainstream, DVD playback on the PC remained a good choice. By the time DVD players reached the $50 price point, PC’s were fast enough and DVD readers/burners were cheap enough that it was still a winning combination. Nowadays, it’s impossible to find a PC or laptop that doesn’t ship with a DVD burner. DVDs have become the format of choice for the world.

The last 4 years have been a golden age of HTPCs. On the mobile computing end, companies like Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD/ATI have had great opportunities to improve battery life during DVD playback. On the desktop end, things have been more exciting. With HDTVs coming into popularity, the higher quality video scaling performance of a HTPC meant that going with a HTPC offered better quality than even the most high-end set-top players. When DVI/HDCP and HDMI finally became a reality, set-top-box players caught up with the HTPC market with “upsampling” DVD players. By then, the HTPC had still leapfrogged the standalone competition with technologies such as PureVideo and AVIVO. With DeCSS, DVD on the HTPC took on a whole new role, with people archiving their DVDs onto hard drives, allowing instantaneous access to mega-libraries of movies. Hollywood may have been concerned about software piracy, but the huge sales of DVDs suggest otherwise.

HTPCs were not simply about DVD playback either. With TIVO bringing “timeshifting” into the public’s vocabulary (or at least making TIVO a verb), HTPCs became a solid alternative to TIVO or Replay TV products. Why spend hundreds of dollars on a TIVO with monthly subscription fees, when you could put a $100 tuner into your PC and have the freedom to upgrade your hard drive at any time. Windows Media Center helped make HTPC use easy, and Media Center Extenders such as the Xbox 360 made it even easier to use a HTPC as a media server. When HDTV PC tuners came out, it was also a no brainer solution. There was no cheaper way to record high-definition content than a HTPC.

When Blu-ray and HD DVD were announced, I had high hopes for a new resurgence in high-end home theater PC s. Unfortunately, every time I’ve tried to do a Blu-ray and HD DVD PC setup, I’ve run into trouble.

Why HD is important

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Some would argue that the future is video-over-IP, aka “On Demand” content. Why bother with physical media such as DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and HD DVD when you can just have your TV, PC, or gaming console hooked up to the Internet or digital cable network. You can watch whatever you want, when you want. Everyone in Hollywood knows that. In fact, that’s what the WGA Strike is all about.

But the future of Video-on-Demand is not without consequences. With IP video, the consumer never really owns anything. Imagine if there was a theatrical re-release of your favorite movie. Do you think you’d be able to watch it on demand? What happens if your network goes down, or a studio changes its licensing terms? Do you think your video-on-demand supplier is going to sell a copy of your personal information to third parties? How much more is that worth to the third party if they know exactly what kind of movies you’re watching? The gremlins that drove the DIVX vs. DVD debate almost a decade ago are still the core issues to be considered before we move onto the world of video-on-demand.

With DVDs, no one keeps track of what you’re watching. Once you own a copy of the DVD, a studio will never be able to prevent you from enjoying the movie when you want, and of course, you can do what you want with the DVD in the privacy of your home.

HD Media

What HD DVD and Blu-ray offer you is the same thing as DVD. Yes, we can talk about new copy protection and licensing rules (BD+, AACS, etc.) but at the end of the day, the crackers who destroyed DVD’s copy protection will eventually destroy HD media’s copy protection. But let’s take a step back.

Suppose HD DVD and Blu-ray fizzle and video-on-demand actually catches on. What then? At that point, you’ll only have two options: DVD and HD-video-on-demand. The problem is that while “DVD is good enough for some people,” we’ve shown time and time again that the difference between HD DVD/Blu-ray and DVD is enormous. It doesn’t matter how good your scaler is. High definition always trumps standard definition, and we have the screenshots to prove it. What’ll end up happening is that studios will control your ability to watch high definition content, allowing the rest of us to do what we want “lower quality” DVDs. As HDTVs get bigger and cheaper, it’s narrow minded to believe that DVD will always be good enough. For many of us, it’s not enough today!

Let’s take the other extreme. Imagine that Blu-ray and/or HD DVD catches on. With enough traction, high definition media can take on the same popularity that DVDs have today. More and more people are buying HDTVs, and that means they’ll be able to take advantage of the high-definition content. Once “the cat is out of the bag,” studios cannot simply stop manufacturing Blu-ray or HD DVD discs – there is too much money at stake. They can’t renege on their social contract with the public to provide movies in a mainstream medium and force everyone to go to video-on-demand. Most importantly, you have to remember that Blu-ray and HD DVD essentially offer reference studio master quality. The majority of today’s movies are mastered with a 2K intermediate (2048x1080resolution). That means the home video (especially with high-quality MPEG-4 AVC) offers 90% of the image quality that is found in the original image. It’s nearly perfect. On the audio end, PCM, DTS-HD, and Dolby TrueHD all offer bit-perfect reproductions of the digital master, and in a practical sense, 640kbps Dolby Digital (the most common format on both HD DVD and Blu-ray) offers nearly the same quality as the original studio master as well.

The HD experience on the PC

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This article arose out of my frustration with PC Blu-ray and HD DVD solutions. FiringSquad is working on our Winter Video Shootout. This is an article that’ll look at ATI’s latest Radeon HD 3850 series with the UVD working to full effect (even 2560x1600 video) comparing ATI and NVIDIA performance on Blu-ray and HD DVD. As a bonus, we were going to look at Blu-ray vs. HD DVD, looking at the exclusive titles for each format.



Going to Vista x32 didn’t solve my problems either. While AMD UVD offered exceptional video decoding performance in our last round-up by offering lower CPU utilization than NVIDIA PureVideo, the latest version of PowerDVD refuses to enable the AVIVO features of the Radeon HD 3850. Hardware acceleration simply wasn’t working at all. Without hardware decoding of MPEG-4 AVC, even a Core 2 Duo E6600 is too slow to play the movie at full speed. Compare this to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 where HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs “just work.”

Turns out that PowerDVD fails to enable the UVD when the monitor is configured for dual display. This is a huge problem as many enthusiasts have their HTPC configured for dual monitors. A desktop LCD for work/play and a dedicated HDMI or DVI connection to the receiver/projector/TV. Given that UVD worked in dual monitor configurations in the past when it comes to deinterlacing, we believe this is a bug with PowerDVD. Why stick with PowerDVD when there’s WinDVD? We’ve yet to get WinDVD working with some of these latest BD-Java movies.

When we had trouble playing BD-J movies with our NVIDIA PureVideo. NVIDIA insisted that it was the software player’s fault. Indeed, it seems to have been the case. Now, we’ve run into a problem with AMD UVD and we’re sure AMD is going to insist that the software player is at fault. This is all fine, and AMD and NVIDIA are probably right. Unfortunately, HTPC enthusiasts just want their system to work.

When you look back at what made HTPCs a viable platform for the select group of video enthusiasts during the era of DVD, there was one big difference. ATI and NVIDIA took charge of their software development. ATI developed their Multimedia Center, providing a common interface for PC TV watching and DVD playback. While there were admittedly problems with the multimedia suite, consumers could rest assured that they’d have no problems using their hardware to its fullest extent. NVIDIA had the PureVideo Decoder along with nStant Media.

Things have gotten “easier” with DXVA and Microsoft’s own MPEG-2 decoder in Windows Vista. When it comes to H.264 and management of Blu-ray/HD DVD though, AMD and NVIDIA have dropped the ball. From our very first attempt at building a Blu-ray HTPC to our current UVD versus PureVideo comparison, we’ve always run into software compatibility issues. NVIDIA and AMD are good at developing the hardware, but they simply don’t have the same level of accountability when all of the pieces of the puzzle are left to other companies.

There are still enough idiosyncracies with Blu-ray and HD DVD playback on the PC where it’s very tempting to go with a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. This shouldn’t be the case. The transition to HDCP monitors and graphics cards are complete and even gamers are moving to Windows Vista. Drives have dropped in price tremendously, and today you can find a Blu-ray/HD DVD hybrid drive for only $300. It should be easier. It should be as simple as buying a Blu-ray drive from ASUS, an external HD DVD drive from Microsoft, or a Blu-ray/HD DVD combo drive from LG, sticking it in your PC and enjoying the high definition revolution…

The first time around, it was a lack of 2560x1600 upscaling. The second time around, it was a lack of BD-Java support. Third time’s the charm, right? This time, I’m having trouble with a dual-monitor configuration. Mind you, I’m not trying to span the image over two monitors – I’m just trying to do full screen video on a secondary monitor. Matrox understood that this was the way HTPC enthusiasts wanted to use their monitors in 1999. Sigh.