Would a PC look and perform better than a standalone BD player?

tyrone burton

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I'm planning on building my first gaming PC in a few month and suddenly wondered if maybe a PC could look better for Blurays a DVDs. With the better graphics card, more RAM, and far better CPU it got me wondering.

My main DVD and Bluray player at the moment is the PS3 slim, could it outperform that?

Some of the specs of my soon to be gaming PC are..
AMD FX8350 8 core CPU 4.0GHZ
two Nividia GTX 680s
16 GB RAM

Hope that helps..
 
In terms of outperforming, technically yeah it will, Plus you'll have easy access to the likes of BBC iplayer, 4OD(If you're in the UK), I think the biggest factors is going to be the software you use and the booting time. Can you wait that 15/20seconds(Maybe longer depending on your set up) for the computer to load? Compared to a dedicated Blu Ray player that will take 5 seconds to boot and ready to put the disk in.

Some software packages that enable you to play your blu rays are so cumbersome and just plain annoying to use as well. So if you can wait a little longer for it too boot and you carefully choose your software, it could quite possibly make a good gaming machine/Blu ray player combo.
 
Riggy said:
In terms of outperforming, technically yeah it will, Plus you'll have easy access to the likes of BBC iplayer, 4OD(If you're in the UK), I think the biggest factors is going to be the software you use and the booting time. Can you wait that 15/20seconds(Maybe longer depending on your set up) for the computer to load? Compared to a dedicated Blu Ray player that will take 5 seconds to boot and ready to put the disk in.

Some software packages that enable you to play your blu rays are so cumbersome and just plain annoying to use as well. So if you can wait a little longer for it too boot and you carefully choose your software, it could quite possibly make a good gaming machine/Blu ray player combo.

That sounds great, but seeing as this is my first PC, I actually didn't know I needed software to play them :)

Can different software for playing these disc movies affect image quality in any way, or is it just how quickly you can get around the menus?
 
The only advantage I see is if you rip your collection to the hard drive, then you would save time looking for and loading a disk, I don't see picture quality being any better.
 
Yeah you can rip your collection, but depending on whether or not you rip the HD audio too, you could need a massive amount of storage space.

To be fair, if your PC is pre built with the blu ray player in, you will most likely get a software package pre-installed to play them.
Image quality is the same throughout as far as I can tell. It is just menu's and stuff, some of them bug the hell out of me (It could be just me). The UI's aren't very user friendly sometimes.
 
Thanks for the info guys, but just to be sure I have it right, will the PC offer a little better image quality than a standalone player? I will be using the discs BTW.
 
I don't believe you'll see a noticeable improvement in image quality unfortunately
 

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