XL201 upgrade to Blu-ray ?

[andysp5]

I have an XL201 and am very happy with it. It's still XP, I'm not touching Vista until it works...
However, I have a few Blu-ray DVD's now and want to upgrade the DVD drive to a Blu-ray unit.
Can the drive from the XL202 just be put in the XL201? If so, do Sony sell these seperately? If not, does any other manufacturer make one I can use ? (Slot loading)
If I do this upgrade, I will then upgrade the graphics card drivers (as mentioned in another thread on this forum) so I can output 1080p.
However, my TV is currently 720p only and I don't want to upgrade yet. If I upgrade to Blu-ray and put in a 1080p disc, will it recognise the output is only 720p?

[FHB]

The Blu-ray drive's a normal notebook drive. It's made by Matsushita and as far as I know you can't buy it separately at the moment.
I see a bigger problem with the rest of the hardware. The E6300 CPU is too slow for decoding of high bandwidth HD material and the 7600GTL graphics card doesn't help much to speed up the process. With the current hardware configuration you won't be able to play the videos smoothly.
You'll need another graphics card as well, either one with a built-in VP2 engine (nVidia) or a card with Avivo (ATI) technology. Unfortunately, there are not many of these cards available in a low-profile version.

[andysp5]

Thanks FHB. I see the XL202 has the E6400 CPU which I presume makes the difference. However, I also note that the XL202 has the same graphics card as the XL201 so I'm a little puzzled why you think that would need upgrading?
Andy

[FHB]

Hi Andy!

The E6400 doesn't make a real difference to be honest.
Tests (like this one) have shown that at least a E6700 is needed to decode high bandwidth HD content properly if the CPU is not supported by the GPU on the graphics card. In the first diagram you see everything's fine with MPEG-2 decoding (that's normal DVD) then scroll down the page and see the results of the X-Men 3 Blu-ray disk - even a E6600 produces framedrops here.
If you read some posts in this forum you notice that even people who bought a VGX-XL302 have problems to play some disks smoothly. That's because the operating system itself runs a lot of background processes even when the Blu-ray player application is the only software you have started. That can easily push the CPU load in playback mode to the 100% limit and you will notice it when the movie freezes for a short moment.

nVidia and ATI have addressed this problem and included HD decoding hardware into the cores of some newer GPU's, like the 8500 and 8600 from nVidia e.g. This hardware decoding takes a lot of the load from the CPU (there are more infos under the link I mentioned). The 7600GTL in the VGX series doesn't have this hardware decoder unfortunately.

[andysp5]

Thanks for that info FHB. Very useful, and probably saved me time and money in trying to upgrade the XL201. Sounds like I need an external Blu-Ray player linked to my TV and Projector.

[FHB]

Well, it is possible to turn the VGX-XL201 into a Blu-ray player. The graphics card issue can be solved with little money. All you need is a graphics card with full HD support (nVidia's 8500GT would be fine) and the E6300/E6400 won't be an issue anymore.
The question is, would you spend several hundred euros for a first generation Blu-ray drive (BD-MLT UJ-215S is the exact name of that drive) - assuming it is available on the market. This reminds me of the first CD or DVD PC drives, they were very expensive but not very performant. The current drives are much better and cost around 30 euros. Of course, this will happen to Blu-ray and HD DVD drives too - in the future.

[andysp5]

Thanks FHB, so maybe I will upgrade it!
I've just had a quick surf for 8500GT cards, and I'm a little puzzled. The pictures of this card show no HDMI output. Is this correct? Or am I blind? Or are the pictures wrong?

[FHB]

Usually, the cards come with DVI connectors, often a DVI-HDMI adaptor is included. You only have to make sure the card supports HDCP to enable playback of copy-protected content like Blu-ray disks.

I was looking for an appropriate card and found this card. It's passively cooled, low profile and has HDMI and DVI connectors. You don't need the second bracket with the audio jack because you connect the audio cable from the VAIO directly to the connector on the card.

[andysp5]

Thanks very much FHB. So maybe I will upgrade the XL201.

[FHB]

Would be interesting if you could post your experiences here in case you make the modifications.

Good luck with your project.