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Blu-ray 3D Movie Playback With PC on a 3D HDTV Using HDMI 1.4

from 3D Vision Blog by Bloody

Following up on the story about the Roxio Cineplayer BD With 3D not being available anymore and the fact that there remain only three software Blu-ray 3D-capable players I’ve decided to check the current situation with them as well. I often get questions if somebody would be able to watch 3D movies on his old PC or laptop on a new 3D HDTV, something that seems easy at first, but things may get problematic depending on what is the video card in the system. The problem is that not all software Blu-ray 3D players support every popular 3D output mode and not output modes are available for all output formats.

Below you can find the requirements for playback of 3D videos on HDMI 1.4 3D HDTVs with the different solutions for playing back Blu-ray 3D movies, these are as per the website of the software developers requirements and specifications published on their websites… and they are not that clear.

Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre 5
- NVIDIA GeForce 200/100 Series (Mobile/Desktop) or newer
- AMD (ATI) HD 5000 series or newer
- Intel G45(?) or newer
Corel WinDVD 11 Pro
- NVIDIA GeForce 500/400/300/200/100/9 series/8 series or newer
- AMD Radeon HD 6000 series or newer
- Intel H5x series or newer
Cyberlink PowerDVD 12 Pro/Ultra
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or newer
- AMD Radeon HD 6800 series or newer
- 2nd generation Intel Core processors with Integrated Graphics

So if you have a system with these specifications as a minimum (the specific GPU depending on the manufacturer), in theory you should not have trouble playing Blu-ray 3D movies on a 3D-capable HDTV using HDMI 1.4 frame packaging. These software solutions of course also support Nvidia 3D Vision, 3D DLP Checkerboard and Row Interleaved (passive 3D), Anaglyph and maybe a few extra ones and with them things are generally easier to setup and they simply work.

The real problem is making things work using HDMI 1.4 frame packaging and it might turn to be more problematic, in my experience, to make an integrated Intel GPU work, so as a good advice I’d recommend to download the trial version of the three software Blu-ray 3D players mentioned above and try them all on your PC before deciding which one you should buy. This can save you a lot of trouble in actually making thing work as you want them to and not having to rely only on some requirements listed by the software developer as practice tends to show that these not always turn out to be true or things simply don’t work as you expect them to. Also, another good advice is to always use the latest official video drivers and to have all the updates for the player software as these do help in resolving some issues, although in some rare occasions they also might break compatibility.