WinDVD Hardware Requirements - Blu-ray vs HD DVD

[Ian]

I was reading the release notes for WinDVD BD and WinDVD HD last night. One thing that really stuck out to me were the hardware requirements.

WinDVD BD
Processor Intel Presslor 2.8GHz (lowest)
RAM 256MB
Operating System Windows XP (Professional and Home Edition) / SP2
MCE (Emerald)
Graphic card nVidia GeForce 6600GT 256MB VRAM (VGA, DVI with HDCP, TV out)
Sound card HD Audio (Sigmatel CXD9872RD), 5.1 Channel, S/PDIF out
Optical Drive (not specified - works with all?)
DirectX DirectX 9

WinDVD HD
Processor Pentium Dual Core 3.2 GHz and above
RAM 1GB and above
Operating System Windows XP (Professional and Home Edition) / SP2
MCE (Emerald)
Graphic card nVidia 6600 or ATI X1400 and above
Sound card (not specified)
Optical Drive HD-DVD Drive: TOSHIBA DVDW/HD TS-L802A / AC02
(need to install the driver come with the device, Windows XP default DVD drive won’t work)
DirectX DirectX 9

Now is it just me or are the requirements for WinDVD HD considerably higher than those for WinDVD BD? A gig of ram? A dual core CPU? Damn...

[dolphinius_rex]

hrm... I don't think I'll have a computer that can handle an HDDVD-ROM for a while

[jsl]

Now is it just me or are the requirements for WinDVD HD considerably higher than those for WinDVD BD?

That's strange, the hardware requirements should be essentially the same considering both support the same codecs and advanced features such as PiP. In fact I would have thought that the hardware requirements for BD should be higher considering it supports higher maximum bitrate (48Mbps) than HD DVD (30Mbps).

[Matrix3]

Just to remind you that Toshiba A1 player has P4 2.54GHz CPU and 512MB of RAM so idiots who make WinDVD can shoot themselves in the head if their software can't work with same hardware as consumer player. In my opinion any software DVD player is nothing but BS. I bought consumer Toshiba DVD player for $50 that plays every format there including DivX. So why pay for software only player $60 plus you need to buy hardware DVD-ROM drive for extra $40! And who in the world prefers to watch DVD movies on 17" monitor instead of 60" plasma display? Boycott software DVD players for good!

PS: One warning about WinDVD. That software detects what kind of hardware you have so it will not let you play HD-DVD if you don't have dual core no matter what.

[LoneWolf]

I'm hearing a number of reports that early BD commercial movies are still just MPEG-2, with H.264 to come. I wonder if that may be part of the disparity in system requirements.

I think those of us who have vid-cards that support Avivo or PureVideo HD (both having hardware-assist H.264 decode) will be needing them when the new formats arrives.

[dolphinius_rex]

The initial BD titles were MPEG2, and then some later ones were done with VC1, and then some later titles (yet to be released as far as I'm aware) are supposed to use MPEG4.

[jsl]

All Sony titles to date are MPEG2 and it doesn't look like they will switch soon. Warner's initial titles were MPEG2 but now they use the same VC-1 encodings for both HD DVD and BD. Paramount titles to date have been MPEG2 but they will probably follow Warner and use the same VC-1 encodings for its HD DVD and BD releases (why do the same work twice?). Fox and Disney titles have been a mix of MPEG2 and H.264 so far.

Matrix3: Well it's not like the P4 in the Toshiba do all the work. I believe it's only used for things like handling the HDi and such. From http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060623-7121.html :
"A Pentium 4 CPU accounts for the low-end PC label. The Intel processor is joined by a high-definition video decoder from Broadcom and four other digital signal processors. It also contains 1GB of RAM, a 256MB flash drive, and another 32Mb of flash memory."