I don’t have an HDTV or a set-top Blu-ray player. I do have a laptop with a full-HD display and a Blu-ray drive. That should be enough? However, software to play Blu-ray titles on Windows seems to be a bit lacking.

To be clear, this is the only Blu-ray disc that I have tried to play (the only one I have at the moment). It came with a leaflet that said that my player may need a firmware update for “optimal playback.”

First, I tried to play it in Nero Showtime (that came with Nero 8). I had purchased the HD-DVD/Blu-ray plug-in for Nero 8 that is supposed to, among other things, allow HD-DVD and Blu-ray playback in Nero Showtime. HD-DVD worked reasonably well, but when I tried to play this Blu-ray disc, it gave me a “you need to update your firmware” message and then would not play the movie (Nero Showtime just seemed to reset).

I checked on this with Nero support and they mentioned that lots of people are having problems playing newer Blu-ray releases that require this firmware update, but they offered no solution. Nero has since released Nero 9, which seems to have any option for HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback removed from Nero Showtime.

Alright, so I tried to play it in PowerDVD 8 after they released an update that is supposed to address this “firmware update” issue. It acts like it’s going to start playing the movie, and then it crashes with the standard Windows “this program stopped working” dialog box.

Today, I tried Corel WinDVD 9 Plus Blu-ray. This program crashes when I launch it, even if I don’t have any DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray disc in the drive at all.

Is there any other Blu-ray playback software for Windows that I can try? I just want to watch my stupid movie. If you happen to read this and know of any, please drop me a line.

I love the idea of Blu-ray (or HD-DVD), which is pretty much, high quality high definition movies on a disc like a DVD. It is unreasonably more complicated than a DVD, both in terms of its implementation and in actually getting it to work. Maybe I could play older movies that came out before this firmware update business. What about consumers that have a set-top Blu-ray player for their HDTV? Do movie studios really expect all of them to be able to figure out how to hook their players up to the Internet and download the firmware update, or go through whatever other process is necessary to get a firmware update on the player, just to get new movies to play? I hope this all gets sorted out before Blu-ray takes off, and we don’t see a regular stream of required updates causing problems forever.