Yesterday when I got home from work/golf/clubhouse-bar there was a nice little surprise in my mailbox.  The HD-DVD of Happy Feet from the nice folks at Netflix arrived, so Jen and I were really looking forward to being able to watch our first HD-DVD on the MC box.  It was a disaster!  After spending a total of about 6 hours on Monday and Tuesday on the phone with Cyberlink support just getting PowerDVD 7 Ultra to accept my installation key in preparation for this moment, the DVD did not play on my system.  It returned an error saying that my system does not meet the minimum requirements to play HD or BD content.  You're joking, right?  Let's see, AMD 4600+ 2.4Ghz x2 CPU, 2GB 800Mhz dual channel RAM, nVidia 7600GT PCIe graphics, analog component connection to a display (no HDCP in play there!) sure sounds like enough horsepower to me!  But, just to be sure, I ran their HD/BD advisor and discovered that my system did certainly meet the requirements.  So, back on the phone with Cyberlink.  It was getting a bit late, and they close their phones at 11PM EDT (GMT -5) but I caught them in time.  The initial solution was to download the latest patch for PowerDVD 7 Ultra.  OK, sounds valid...  I downloaded and applied it, and got the exact same result.  No love.  Then, the support person told me that it was getting a bit late, so I'd have to call back tomorrow.  Sorry, but I don't think so.  At that point, he merely asked me for a screen shot of the error, and nothing more.  He said he needed to get it to development.  Now, forgive me if I'm wrong here, but generally if support goes to development with nothing but a screenshot of an error, no configuration data, no recreate steps, no info about the environment, support is going to get chucked out of the developer's office faster than the latest Apprentice loser!  At that point, I took the liberty of emailing him the screen shot, the resulting file from the HD/BD advisor and the output of a dxDiag.  Now he should have enough to approach development and I'm supposed to call back in today.

 

However, in my travels online this morning, I made an interesting discovery.  It appears that one of my all time most useful-favorite-easy-versitile applicaitons has added another blade to it's already potent swiss-army-knife-life existance.  Nero 7 has added Blu Ray/HD DVD support!  As I already own Nero 7 Ultra Enhanced, I don't believe that this addition will cost me a dime.  Unfortunately, I'm about 8 miles from my home PC right now, so I can't go and try it, but it's definitely going to be the first thing on my to-do list when I get home today.  If this works out, I plan on altering Mike's Vista HD DVD workaround to suit Nero, and get my $99.99 back from the friendly-but-clueless folks at Cyberlink.  Results will be documented later tonight.