I have two of the GBW-H10N units. Beware that they can't read DL or LTH disks. I haven't tried them in DOS or Windows 98.

Do not store backups on consumer media. At least not if you would like to read them back in 10 years.

Errius wrote:

I have two of the GBW-H10N units. Beware that they can't read DL or LTH disks. I haven't tried them in DOS or Windows 98.

I have seen some conflicting information about this actually. Screenshots from programs like DVDInfoPro seem to indicate that DVD-DL discs are supported. Some reviews confirm this, others say that dual layer discs aren't supported. Interesting! Different board revisions?

Do not store backups on consumer media. At least not if you would like to read them back in 10 years.

That depends on the quality of a disc. Cheapest ones might not survive a year. High quality ones might very well last a decade. Thats fine by me, I backup things on different media types simulantously, and its nothing really critical. Mostly music, movies and disc images.

elod wrote:

Do not store backups on consumer media. At least not if you would like to read them back in 10 years.

Backups are not made to be readable 10 years later. That's archiving you are talking about. It's perfectly fine to store backups on consumer media as long as one understands that this is no long-term storage.

HTPCs get pretty advanced and there is a lot of nice software and h/w acceleration today you would miss out on with this plan. Get a dvdrom drive and a regular set top bluray player instead. Backups to a NAS will be cheaper and more convenient. These are less effort without bottlenecking the feature set.

XTac wrote:

I have seen some conflicting information about this actually. Screenshots from programs like DVDInfoPro seem to indicate that DVD-DL discs are supported. Some reviews confirm this, others say that dual layer discs aren't supported. Interesting! Different board revisions?

DVDs are fine, it's the BD-R DL (50 GB) format that's the problem. The latest firmware is GL06 from 2009 but that doesn't help.

As far as watching BDs is concerned, you will need a graphics card (and monitor, IIRC) that supports HDCP. You can probably use an AGP-interface Radeon HD 2xxx or newer for this purpose... probably.

SW-SSG wrote:

As far as watching BDs is concerned, you will need a graphics card (and monitor, IIRC) that supports HDCP. You can probably use an AGP-interface Radeon HD 2xxx or newer for this purpose... probably.

That... is a problem. No real way getting around that. I plan to use a GeForce 6800 Ultra or 7950, which I assume are not HDCP compliant. Might as well drop the movie watching idea. However such a drive would still be useful for backups and ripping, I suppose.

Blu-ray on PC was a nightmare back in 2008-2009 when I first tried it out. I don't think it has gotten any better. The last time I tried was back in ~2013. I think you still need to have bloated retail products like PowerDVD or other similar suites to be able to play Blu-ray reliably, and even then you may have to fight with incompatibilities and upgrading all the time. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but that's how it was back then.

Its a really cool idea to incorporate this into a retro build but early blu-ray software ruined several movie nights for me and my family and friends. It is an ever-changing ecosystem of copy protection which makes it less appealing on a retro-oriented system. The reason your average cheap blu-ray player doesn't have these problems is because the vast majority of player manufacturers were forced to stop incorporating analog connections (component mainly) in 2011-2012, leaving only HDCP-protected HDMI interfaces. This means that there is copy protection all the way from the disk to the screen with no chance of anything getting in the middle. On a PC, the software accessing the disk has to be up to date or the disk will try its best to prevent it from accessing the data, just in case that software is actually trying to rip or copy it.

AnyDVD will let you play the bluray on non-HDCP graphics cards and monitors. Can't remember the earliest ver that supported blu-ray. AnyDVD does work on XP.

Once you use AnyDVD then you can just use VLC to play the movie straight from Blu-ray or you can probably use any blu-ray software....although I do wonder what the performance would be like over IDE.

Didn't play around with AnyDVD and playing blu-ray on a pc too much since I watch my Blu-rays straight from FreenNAS using Plex Server and rip with MakeMKV.

XTac wrote:

Anyways, I have come up with a crazy idea to combine retro gaming with HTPC. I'd like to watch a Blu Ray movie from time to time […]
Show full quote

Anyways, I have come up with a crazy idea to combine retro gaming with HTPC. I'd like to watch a Blu Ray movie from time to time, and store backups on BD discs. Turns out that Blu Ray drives on IDE exist - there aren't many, and they were all made around 2006 - 2008. Such a drive would be extremely convinient - not only will I be able to use a native connection without any buggy adapters, but I would also likely solve the problem that plagues SATA drives from the retro gaming angle: no analogue CD audio.

...

Using such a drive, I would be able to combine everything - CD, DVD, BluRay, and even IDE connections. (You only lack HD-DVD, but as far as I know, no combo drive has been made for IDE 😢 ) Add a quality sound card to that and you have the ultimate early/mid 00s HTPC.

Question is, does anyone here have some experience with these drives under these conditions? Does CD Audio actually work? Any bugs under DOS or Win 98? I would really be interested in hearing about this. Thanks in advance. 😊

Regarding CD Audio: As long as those drives have connectors for an Audio CD cable (i.e. the small cable that plugs your CD drive into your sound card), I don't see why it wouldn't work.
Regarding DOS/Win98 support: Proper DOS CD drivers should see the drive as a regular CD drive (no guaranties that it'll read DVDs or Blu-Rays in DOS mode, though, as that OS predates those standards). I honestly doubt that Windows 98 (or anything older than XP, for that matter) knows how to co-operate with Blu-Ray discs as it is, I remember finding a UDF driver that allows Win9x to read Blu-Rays (I want to say rloew made it, but my memory may be foggy there) so YMMV.

Other than that, I have no experience with PC Blu-Ray drives simply because like most common folk on earth, I really didn't have a reason to bother since better methods exist for large file transfer, and I simply use a regular old set-top player to watch movies on my TV. Watching a movie on a (smaller) computer screen just doesn't feel right to me.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Its a really cool idea to incorporate this into a retro build but early blu-ray software ruined several movie nights for me and my family and friends. It is an ever-changing ecosystem of copy protection which makes it less appealing on a retro-oriented system. The reason your average cheap blu-ray player doesn't have these problems is because the vast majority of player manufacturers were forced to stop incorporating analog connections (component mainly) in 2011-2012, leaving only HDCP-protected HDMI interfaces. This means that there is copy protection all the way from the disk to the screen with no chance of anything getting in the middle. On a PC, the software accessing the disk has to be up to date or the disk will try its best to prevent it from accessing the data, just in case that software is actually trying to rip or copy it.

You may have forgotten that Macrovision copy protection affects all analog inputs (including: Component, Composite, S-Video, and RF), so copy protection is IMO an invalid excuse for DVD/Blu-ray player manufacturers to drop the analog inputs. The way I see it, most Blu-ray players are HDMI only just to make older TVs (without HDMI) obsolete, what other reason explains why most devices have just HDMI outputs these days?

Probably best to forget Blu-Ray movie playback, it doesn't really gel with a retro build. For starters, it's not just a HDCP capable setup you need to worry about, but also a graphics card that can do hardware decoding of the MPEG-2, H.264 & VC-1 video codecs. Not all cards can do all 3 and if your graphics card cannot do it (which the ones you have listed, cannot) then the full processing falls back onto the CPU and even the early dual core CPUs cannot playback Blu-Ray properly, so you have absolutely no chance on a Pentium M.

But if you did want to go down that path, you'd need at least 1 of the AGP Radeon HD cards. A 2xxx series card has already been suggested, but you can also pick up the HD 3xxx series cards quite cheaply and HD 4xxx series AGP cards are available for a bit more money. But the flip side to doing this, those cards don't tend to be all that great for 3D gaming. Software wise, you're going to need PowerDVD to play regular discs and you're going to need at least version 15 onwards, which requires Windows 7 or above to run.

1 last thing, the minimum system requirements for Blu-Ray playback as suggested by Cyberlink: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66GHz), AMD Phenom 9450 (2.10GHz) or above.

Macrovision is irritating, but has been compromised for years from a content owner perspective.

It's all about creation of scarcity - the content owners don't really care about theoretical security, just that there is no widely available alternative to their (region coded 🙁 ) release. They actually intentionally make it difficult for the end-user, shifting requirements and possibilities all the time. The equipment vendors love this, as it gives them the chance to sell essentially the same device multiple times.

The original idea of having HDCP-protected digital and separate analog was that pirates would only be intersted in the digital out and that no-one would rip off that. Then it turned out that you can take a very good quality rip from a good component out and that your average consumer doesn't give a rat's arse about the marginal quality difference (your average consumer doesn't even notice when they have their HD equipment hooked up via SD RGB or S-Video...). That upset the content cart, and provided perfect excuse to roll out a revised standard that would make older stuff not work well. Which is why we are screwed when trying to do anything retro with BluRay.

I think the HD 3850/4670 (both apparently pretty close in performance in their AGP versions) are actually decent for 3D gaming IMO. Anything that's not DX11 or newer will be totally fine on these cards, with lowered settings of course. It's definitely more than enough graphics performance for a Pentium M. I could see some other uses as well. Not only will a machine equipped with such a card play Blu-rays, it will also flawlessly play 1080p YouTube videos, provided you use Firefox/Chrome/Opera with h264ify (and you can stomach the decrease in quality compared to YouTube's now standard, much improved VP9 compression). That should benefit your HTPC use case. You could even install Kodi as a media center application; that leverages hardware decoding as well.

If you're dead set on sticking with your 6800 Ultra or 7950, I agree with PTherapist - you would need a change of platform; either get one of those funky ASRock boards with Socket 775 and an AGP slot plus a C2D or maybe you can go Socket 939 with an Athlon 64 X2 (definitely needs overclocking though) to keep it slightly more "retro". Be prepared to see close to 100% CPU usage though. Might get loud depending on your cooling setup.

Best of luck!

Thanks everyone for your answers, I pretty much got everything I wanted to know.

I don't own any IDE BD drive yet. I plan to get it sometime just for the novelty and convenience sake, but now I know that it won't be as pretty as I hoped. The good thing is that it (probably) supports everything retro gaming related, so that won't be a bad option.

As for the graphic cards, I plan to stick with either the 6800 or 7950 because these cards seem to be most compatible with Win2000/XP era games from what I have read. I already plan to get a Geforce 4 or FX just for these odd windows 98 that don't work right with a faster card. I assume a HD 4670 would not be as compatible. If I needed more peformance, I'd probably build a C2D or C2Q system as you advise, and go with a PCI-e card.

Panasonic SW-5582-C seems to be another option, and support BR-DL