The Build from Hell: Part V: Watching Blu-Rays

Isn't it nice when things just work? You get in your car, turn the key, and the engine doesn't tell you that it only works on manufacturer-approved roads. You pick up the phone, push some buttons, and don't have to press speakerphone to hear over the handset. You turn a knob on a faucet and don't get an error message that your sink is not in the correct region.

This is the way computers should be and, until recently, the way they had been working for me. That all changed with The Build from Hell.

So part of the reason for the Build from Hell was to be able to watch Blu-rays. A few days after the initial frustrations, I decided to test this ability out.

The movie of choice was Toy Story 3, because it's one of three Blu-rays we have (the other two being Toy Stories 1 and 2). Pop the disc in, Windows Media Center automatically opens and... wants me to set the region for the Blu-ray drive. OK, this is a little odd, considering I had already set the region when I watched a DVD the other night. Can you set the region for Blu-ray playback separately from DVD? Kind of cool, if so, but irrelevant.

So I set the region, then hit play and... an error appears! (Were you expecting anything else?) The error is (some of the more knowledgeable of you may have seen this coming) "Blu-ray playback requires a connection that supports HDCP encryption, such as DVI or HDMI".

BLARGH BLARGH BLARGH BLARGH!

As you may remember from Part III, while the card has DVI out, the TV only has VGA in, thus necessitating a converter (of which I have plenty lying around), and the HDMI plain and simple doesn't work... unless another monitor is plugged into the video card. This gives me my workaround: I leave the DVI-to-VGA connection in place, but reconnect the HDMI. The Windows desktop is now extended from one TV connection to the other. Flipping inputs on the TV changes between the two halves of the Windows desktop. I set up the HDMI-half of the desktop as the primary desktop (and ironically have difficulty getting the Display Settings control panel onto it), and try the Blu-ray again. Now it works.

This is how it remains to this day: the Windows desktop is extended on the same display device. The second half of the display only exists so the first one--the one I want--will actually work.

Sound, of course, is another issue (what, you wanted to hear your movie? What is this? 1927?), however, the solution is simple. The TV will play sound for whatever is the current input (each input has its own sound feed). Switching over to HDMI input also switched away from the audio-out of the computer (which fed to the audio-in associated with the TV's VGA connection). In the Windows control panel, I just set the HDMI output to also be the primary audio output device (video cards with integrated sound! What'll they think of next!), and the sound works perfectly.

This also has the effect of solving another audio problem that I was having. Namely, the case is mis-wired, so that it thinks that there is something plugged into the front-panel audio jack when nothing is, and vice versa. Of course, the computer will only use one audio output at a time, so when it thinks something is plugged into the front-panel jack, it mutes the rear audio. In order to hear anything, Rie had to plug a pair of headphones into the front audio jack, which was the only way to get it to use the rear audio jack. Crazy world we live in, i'n'it?

But switching audio over to the HDMI connection corrected the whole thing. Killed two early-birds with one worm!

So we now, at least, have decent Blu-ray capability. And the best part is the new keyboard.

This little thing is awesome. It's a Bluetooth keyboard, so I didn't know whether it would work without installing drivers, but it actually works in the BIOS, no drivers necessary. It has the functions of a basic keyboard (minus a few buttons, like home, end, and function keys); it has a trackpad so you can move the cursor without needing a place to rest a mouse (useful for couch-watching!); and it has built-in media center controls, so you can use it to play, pause, stop, fast forward and rewind movies. It has a ridiculously long range: I can control the TV from in the kitchen with it, so it works much better than our old wireless keyboard and mouse, which had what seemed like a 6' range (fun to use from a couch 7' away from the TV!) It is the only part of the build that worked flawlessly, perfectly, right out of the box. Kudos, Logitech. Kudos and brownie points.