My shipment of anime tomorrow will include a considerable number of BD disks, and tonight I decided to try an experiment.

I can't play BD on this computer with my BD drive. Playback stutters. But it occurred to me that it might be better if I ripped the BD to disk, which also decrypts it, and then see if I can play back the result. So right now I'm ripping the Aika Zero BD that I bought, and copying it to storage on Deneb.

Here's what's cool: sustained transfer rate is about 14.5 megabytes per second, with a CPU load here on Procyon of about 30%. I think the limiting factor is the BD drive read rate. Its activity light is solid blue with no flicker at all.

Another problem I had was that my stuff doesn't support all the audio codecs used by BD. I was able to hear sound on the two American BD's I bought, but not on Aika Zero. Another reason I wanted to try this with the Aika Zero disk was to see if that changed with Win 7. Probably not, but you never know until you try.

Still, I'm really pleased with that read rate. If it was gonna take a couple of hours per disk to rip it, then it would have been really painful. But ripping a disk in about a quarter of the normal playback time is completely acceptable.

UPDATE: Rip complete. Playback is a little jerky, with the CPU running between 70% and 90% busy. But it isn't intolerable, the way it was when I was trying to play directly off the drive. (2 seconds of play, one second of nothing.)

I don't know what the sound would be like; I still can't hear anything. Grumble. I need a codec, and I don't have any idea where to get it.

UPDATE: I just ripped "Cosmic Voyage". 11 gigabytes in 13 minutes.

Except that one won't play at all. ZoomPlayer locks up.

Am I gonna have to install that newer version of PowerDVD that came with the drive?

UPDATE: Mass copying from Deneb to Procyon is about 60 megabytes per second. Which I have to do because Handbrake refuses to open a file on Deneb.

UPDATE: Well, crap. Since I was successful using Handbrake to translate the Cosmic Voyage BD, I thought I'd try the same thing with Aika.

'Twas not to be. It kept crashing as soon as it started trying to process audio.

I really really really don't want to install the newer version of PowerDVD. I remember what grief it caused me last time. But I may have no choice but to figure out how to use it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 06:54 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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