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First burns with the Pioneer BDC-202 combo drive

ljpp — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:59:21 +0000

Pioneer BDC-202 is an interesting combo drive that brings you the features of a Blu-ray BD-ROM drive and a DVD recorder. As such it is an interesting choice for any home computer, but especially for HTPCs due to the Blu-ray playback features. We have just started testing the drive, and as usual our primary interest is on the DVD recording quality. The drive uses a “three-way compatible” optical pickup unit, which means that a single optical unit is handling all the disc formats. As such the recording speed is a bit slower than the fastest DVD recorders on the market, but the 12x speed should be quite sufficient for everyone unless you are planning on using the drive for DVD-R mass production. We have just started testing the drive and so we decided to publish the first results right away, even thought the testing work is far from completed, since this is a drive that has a lot of consumer interest currently.

Our first experiences with the combo drive as a DVD recorder have been surprisingly good. I say surprisingly as we kinda expected the DVD recording to be a secondary feature for this drive, but apparently it has done a damn good job so far. As mentioned earlier, the recording speed is limited to 12x using the Z-CLV method (Zone Constant Linear Velocity). So far we have thrown half a dozen types of DVD recordable media in to this drive, and so far it has done a great job. In every case the quality has been comparable to Pioneer’s recent DVD recorder models (DVR-215, DVR-115) and in some cases the BDC-202 has produced extremely good reference quality results.

We will be burning more discs in the days to come, and we will also come back to this great drive with a proper review. Meanwhile you can track our progress by looking at our Nero Disc Speed (previously known as Nero CD-DVD Speed) quality scan results at the MediaBase: CLICK HERE

We are also more than interested in hearing if you already have some experiences with this drive. Use the comment feature below to share your thoughts about it.

Media Player Classic (MPC)

ljpp — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 10:14:30 +0000

Media Player Classic (usually abbreviated as MPC) is a light wight, but fully featured audio and video player. It’s user interface is very similar to the old Windows Media Player, thus the name Classic. It has built in codecs and support for VideoCD, Super VideoCD and DVD playback. It utilizes the DirectShow architecture, so it can automatically use any DirectShow decoders that are installed in the system (see: FFDSHOW).

MPC is a highly recommended replacement for Windows Media Player, and combined with FFDSHOW it is suited for all typical audio/video playback uses.

Author: Gabest
License: Open source

FFDSHOW

ljpp — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 09:54:02 +0000

FFDSHOW is DirectShow and VFW codec for decoding/encoding many video and audio formats, including DivX and XviD movies using libavcodec, xvid and other opensourced libraries with a rich set of postprocessing filters. FFDSHOW supports virtually every audio and video format used in movies or other video content on the internet, and decodes them with excellent quality and high performance. Includes a lot of options for tweaking, but works very well out-of-the-box, being transparent for the end-user.

Author: Milan Cutka
License: Open source

VLC Media Player

admin — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 09:39:16 +0000

VLC media player (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG, DivX, Ogg, and many more) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. However in recent years it has also become a extremely powerful server to stream live and on demand video in several formats to our network and the Internet.It started as a student project at the French École Centrale, Paris but is now a worldwide project with developers from 20 countries. (more).

VLC is built in a modular way. This means that you can choose from a range of different modules to decide how to control VLC and how to display the video output.

A unique feature of VLC is that it has all the major codecs built in, so you do not need to install additional codecs to your operating system (Windows, Linux..) in order to get playback support.

Author: VideoLAN
License: Open source