viewing bluray films on pc

[Matt]

Drive noise is caused by fast spinning, and currently all BR drives spin the discs very slowly.

For DVD noise issues, get Nero DriveSpeed, you can set the speed to a much quieter level

[randombs]

I've also got that LG combo drive. So far it's been fine, although for some reason it refuses to play the second layer on my Matrix Reloaded HDDVD so the film pauses at the same point and beyond (disc is mint, plays fine using the 360 drive on my PC).

I'm not sure why that is, and it hasn't happened with any other discs - HDDVD, BR or DVD - including the other Matrix films in the collection.

I bought a £25 fanless Nvidia 8400GS for my PC and it did wonders for the sound levels. The card can decode the films itself, so the CPU (E6750 Core2 2.5GHz) doesn't have to work as hard, which in turn keeps the CPU fan quiet. I played the Die Hard 4.0 BR with the previous gfx card (budget ATi Radeon X1300) and CPU was at 70-75%, then again with the 8400 and it dropped to 10-15%.

So I'd imagine any graphics card better than that will be fine!

As for setting up the drive, you just plug it in and that's it. If you're on Vista there's nothing else you'll need to do. I'm not sure about XP but when I used to use the 360 drive on my XP machine it needed a UDF filesystem driver to read the actual HDDVD discs (but not for the drive itself)