Floppyhead – Digital Media and Streaming

Update: Cyberlink’s Play Movie plugin is OEM only, meaning you cannot buy it retail.   You have to get it from a manufacturer like Velocity Micro PC.  That being said, PowerDVD Ultra is the only PC-based option for watching HD-DVDs and Blu-ray discs.
Chris Morley at Velocity Micro PC (the only place offering a decent CableCard media center, in my opinion) briefly mentioned a new plugin, Play Movie 1.5, from CyberLink that improves HD-DVD and Blu-ray performance for media center pcs. From the blog post:

It’s CyberLink’s plug-in for Media Center that allows seemless playback of Blu-ray AND HD-DVD media! It will replace our PlayBD plug-in that only does Blu-ray. And to boot, it does hook into NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD and ATI’s AVIVO technology to enhance visual quality and reduce CPU overhead. Here’s the real kicker – it also plays DVDs and it’s noticeably better in image quality than Microsoft’s own MPEG2 decoder! So even if you’re not interested in Blu-ray or HD-DVD; if you’re a discerning A/V enthusiast, Play Movie 1.5 is the bee’s knees.

Hopefully this means that the plugin will not require you to leave the Vista Media Center interface, which is the main issue now with media center’s implementation of next gen DVDs. From Chris’s posts at AVSForums.com, it looks like the plugin will only support 2 channel audio. Crazy.

I also looked at CyberLink’s website but I saw no mention of the plugin. No press release or announcement. Nothing. This is definitely something to look out for though.