Blu-ray on the PC

[Takeshi666]

After some considerable fiddling, I've come to encounter a rather frustrating issue regarding blu-ray playback on the PC.

On the surface, the fact that blu-ray region coding is entirely on the software layer unlike DVD which was on both hardware and software, it should be a breeze to circumvent region coding on the PC, right? Well, it isn't.

Until late last year, I was in a reasonably comfortable position; I was using PowerDVD 8 with this little tray app for Windows that allowed you to reset the region counter to any region in a flash, and you didn't even have to restart the playback software for it to take effect - this lasted until I got Kino's blu-ray of Giorgio Moroder's Metropolis, which just flat out refused to play unless I "updated" my player...which I eventually realized meant that I had to start using some other player. That's where things started getting difficult.

The tray app didn't support any of the newer players, not even TotalMedia Theatre 5 which it claims to support, so that was rendered obsolete. I wasn't willing to start using AnyDVD again because the real-time decoding which it forced my computer to resulted in blu-ray playback being extremely sluggish. DVD Fab's Passkey doesn't seem to do anything for PowerDVD 11 either so now I have two completely different players installed just so I can play two different regions, and for some reason my old PowerDVD 8 refuses to acknowledge there is ANY disc inserted at all anymore.

If someone has any ideas that're guaranteed to work, I'm listening...