Posts made in April 5th, 2008

Dealing with DRM: BluRays on PowerDVD Ultra 8

Posted by Funkdancer on Apr 5, 2008 in Home Theatre PC | 1 comment

For the Blu-ray Disc (BD) (aka Bluray) addicts out there, Cyberlink’s PowerDVD Ultra is out in version 8. It is sporting a brand new user interface, and allows playback of BD+ titles. I bought the upgrade yesterday – and I will answer the question of why here.

A must have for PC Blu-ray playback is AnyDVD HD, as this will remove the incredibly annoying regional zones. Furthermore it will allow ripping your purchased BDs to hardisk for more quiet playback; the Pioneer BDC-S02 player has many nice qualities, but ultra quietness is not one of them. Furthermore, having backed up your BD, you can safely store the original out of harm’s way and instead use the back up for playback.

Unfortunately for us, that’s not the way the studios see the picture – instead they want to make it as difficult as possible for us to do this by way of DRM. (There’s little wonder why hardly anyone is using their HTPCs for Blu-rays!)

Wordpress 2.5 is out

Posted by Funkdancer on Apr 5, 2008 in Internet | Comments Off

For the bloggers out there, Wordpress is out in version 2.5 as of a week ago. I just upgraded my own blog at Bluehost; pretty painless thing, however rather than deleting, I simply renamed wp-includes and wp-admin to include an _ / underscore, then copied the files across and touched on the upgrade.php file.

One issue was that the maintenance mode plugin didn’t let me go to upgrade.php, so I simply renamed the plugin directory and I was fine.