HP Quickplay supports BD-LIVE but has some issues

[HDTV1080P]

A friend of mine owns a top of the line HP 20.1 inch Notebook running Vista Ultimate 64 bit edition with 4GB of RAM. The portable computer cost over $4,200. I had an opportunity to test it using Casino Royal collectors Edition which contains a picture and picture commentary and also BD-LIVE. I was using the latest software update known as Quickplay 3.7 v.5704. The Quickplay software played the picture and picture commentary just fine. When I tried the BD-LIVE feature I was amazed at the super fast download speed and fast menu navigation compared to the Sony BDP-S350. Of course the Sony player cost around $243 and the HP Notebook my friend has was over $4,200. The Sony BDP-S350 was using 16GB of flash memory where the computer can use ram and the hard drive for storage which is faster for HD downloads compared to flash memory. The only problem with Quickplay is that after watching each BD-LIVE HD video clips it would stop working. I waited for several minutes but the player had to be closed and re-opened each time a new clip was watched due to a software glitch with Quickplay. Hopefully a future firmware update will fix this BD-LIVE Quickplay problem. Still even with this major problem I still prefer the computer since standalone BLU-RAY players are a nightmare in speed with the navigation and downloads for BD-LIVE. Even after the Quickplay software stops working after each clip, and requires the software to be closed and reopened the speed is still so much faster over standalone BLU-RAY players. A future firmware update should fix this bug, at least it worked with BD-LIVE.

[CyberVisions]

Originally Posted by HDTV1080P

A friend of mine owns a top of the line HP 20.1 inch Notebook running Vista Ultimate 64 bit edition with 4GB of RAM. The portable computer cost over $4,200. I had an opportunity to test it using Casino Royal collectors Edition which contains a picture and picture commentary and also BD-LIVE. I was using the latest software update known as Quickplay 3.7 v.5704. The Quickplay software played the picture and picture commentary just fine. When I tried the BD-LIVE feature I was amazed at the super fast download speed and fast menu navigation compared to the Sony BDP-S350. Of course the Sony player cost around $243 and the HP Notebook my friend has was over $4,200. The Sony BDP-S350 was using 16GB of flash memory where the computer can use ram and the hard drive for storage which is faster for HD downloads compared to flash memory. The only problem with Quickplay is that after watching each BD-LIVE HD video clips it would stop working. I waited for several minutes but the player had to be closed and re-opened each time a new clip was watched due to a software glitch with Quickplay. Hopefully a future firmware update will fix this BD-LIVE Quickplay problem. Still even with this major problem I still prefer the computer since standalone BLU-RAY players are a nightmare in speed with the navigation and downloads for BD-LIVE. Even after the Quickplay software stops working after each clip, and requires the software to be closed and reopened the speed is still so much faster over standalone BLU-RAY players. A future firmware update should fix this bug, at least it worked with BD-LIVE.

I'll assume the system you're referring to is mine, a 20.1" Pavilion HDX 9300, or one of the 9400 series systems.

For future reference on that machine and other problems, note that we have a pretty good professional group of HDX owners at NotebookReview.com (HDX Owners lounge). Tell your friend to come and join us as our systems are no longer made by HP, and are being snapped up where they can be found, if and when they're found.

Also - tell your friend NOT TO INSTALL the latest F.40 E BIOS update - we've seen serious problems with it that even HP hasn't been able to address (not that it surprises me).

That said -

The problem you're referring to sounds like what happens when you're trying to watch a BD on an external display and you've got your notebook display running as well - the NVIDIA setting is Cloned or Multiple Displays.

You cannot run a BD movie with both displays running - HDCP won't allow it. The only way to get it to work properly is to set the external display as the Primary notebook display, and then run the BD from QuickPlay after that's setup.

If you're running it strictly on the notebook's 1080p display, or are configured correctly for external display use, the way to deal with BD live is to isolate your system from the 'net altogether - shut down your WAN connections or Ethernet if plugged into hardwired outlet. There's been many reports of BD-live disks causing this kind of problem, and that's the way to deal with it.

The chances of seeing a firmware update for the HDX BD-ROM drive is slim and none, since the firmware really isn't the problem - the QP 3.7 update really eliminated a lot of new Blu-Ray disk version problems that were seen with newer version BD's.