How to play and screengrab HD-DVD/Blu-Ray FREE!

PureVideo and Cinemaster codecs aren't free either, actually; worse, PureVideo filter only plays MPEG-2 Bluray discs. To utilize decoding for other formats, you have to have one of the other players, typically the sonic or cyberlink codecs for gpu acceleration.

I'm pretty sure Nvidia Purevideo came free with my graphics card. Not too sure about the Cineplayer codec pack but nobody seems to be selling it. Changed the wording to "mostly free" so everyone should be satisfied now. I've not come across any other formats ...... yet. One strange HD-DVD was Brotherhood of the Wolf which only has a DTS-HD sound track and has to be played with Sonic HD Demuxer + Sonic Audio and Video Decoders. Canal Plus just has to be different!

Blu-Ray with VC1 encoding is not a problem either.

It really bugged me, having to use Cineplayer codecs for the audio on HD-DVD, their Sonic HD splitter just didn't work properly and got in the way of smooth playback. I wanted to use Haali as much as possible. Zoomplayer + Haali + FFDShow Just to be greedy, I was playing HD-DVD in one window and Blu-Ray in the second window (OK so it maxed out my CPU) Just drag the .EVO or .m2ts into the Zoomplayer window If it doesn't work, right click in zoomplayer, look at the filter list, uninstall the unwanted filter that is causing the problem If you want to use Haali video renderer (rather than default), right click in zoomplayer, advanced mode, options, video, custom,select custom renderer, Haali Video Renderer File playback is now totally free of charge

That's pretty cool. =o

Last time I tried this (a few months back), ffdshow couldn't handle audio formats like DD+. Also, quite a few evo files confused Haali, and you end up with the 24fps played at 30fps. Bluray seems to work fine though, since LPCM doesn't need decoded at all, and .m2ts is little different from .ts.