Blu-ray screenshots commence!

A couple of weeks ago I issued a cry for help because I couldn’t work out how to grab screen shots from Blu-ray discs. I’m thankful to the four people who emailed me with various suggestions.

Two of these involved running software directly on the relevant video file on the disc. Only problem was, my computer wouldn’t open a Blu-ray disc or a HD DVD. As far as it was concerned, there were no discs there.

PowerDVD Ultra worked with them all right (7.3 for HD DVD, 8 for Blu-ray), but Explorer and other tools on the computer wouldn’t. What was odd was that I clearly remember that when I had a Pioneer Blu-ray burner installed a while back, Explorer would readily display the contents of the Blu-ray disc.

I spent a bit of time googling around and discovered that you need to have a UDF 2.5 driver installed to allow normal operating system access to these new format discs. Today I confirmed with Pioneer that its drives do indeed come with such a driver. (In addition, I’m told, they also comes with hooks that allow them, uniquely, to work with Windows Media Center.)

The LG drive doesn’t come with this, which strikes me as bit peculiar. Anyway, there was a workaround (the first post in this thread says how to do it, the seventh contains the link to the required driver).

So with this done, and the suggestions listened to, I now present my first direct comparison between Blu-ray and DVD quality, for the disc Almost Famous. I expect to add many more as time goes by.

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