What does a retail Blu-ray player have over a pc system?

[jbobst]

I just put together a computer systems from a spare computer I had laying around, in order to get a home computer system that I could watch Blu-ray movies on with my 42" LCD TV. (I figured that I could buy an internal blu-ray player SATA drive for around $60 and not have to spend around $100 for a regular "set-top" player). I have a decent video card (an ATI X1950), but the computer is only running a Celeron 2.8gHZ with 1GB of DDR2 RAM. So, I bought the cheap internal blu-ray drive for around $60 and bought a DVI to HDMI adapter for my video card. I plugged in my TV to the computer and everything looked great, as far as playing a video game, the desktop resolution, etc. I even downloaded a sample 1080p video from the internet and played it in Windows media player (displaying it on my 42" HDTV) and it looked great! So, I then put a Blu-ray movie in the blu-ray drive an use the Cyberlink software to play it, and the movie is just awful and choppy. Very un-watchable. So, after reading a few threads on this forum, it's apparent that my celeron computer system just doesn't have nearly the horsepower that I need to play blu-ray movies.

So my question is this...if you need at least a dual core processor, a really good video card, and probably at least 2GB of RAM, what in the world does a regular "set-top" blu-ray player (like you would buy at Walmart that just plugs directly into your HDTV) have inside it??? I mean, you can buy a set-top blu-ray player for close to $100 these days. Do these skinny little players have a dual core processor with a high end video card built into them? I am sure they don't, and I know that they aren't a "computer", but rather, just a "player", but how are they able to output smooth HD video from a blu-ray disc to a TV perfectly fine, yet if I want my computer to do this, I have to make sure I have some high end components too to get even close to the quality of a ~$100 set-top player.

I am sure that if a set-top player only costs around $100 these days, I would guess that the "components" in the player are not even close to even my lowly celeron 2.8ghz processor and ATI video card combination...so how can it play so much better???

At this point, it doesn't really make sense to spend a bunch more money on new motherboard, processor and RAM, when I can just get a player for around $100, so that is probably what I am going to end up doing. It is nice to be able to plug my computer into my LCD TV, but I really just want to watch blu-ray movies on my TV and that's about it.

Thanks for any help.