My DVD drive is almost finished and I thought this time I would get a Blu-ray ROM drive, they are only about £40 now.

So what do you need to be able to play Blu-ray films on your PC. Firstly you need a half decent PC, goes without saying really, We cant expect HD video on some old cranky machine, then you need...

3 things:

    Blu-ray drive

    HD graphics card (ATI Radeon HD 2400 or greater, Geforce 7600GT or greater)

    A good Blu-ray player (software)

I've spent some time looking into Blu-ray players for the PC and from what users are saying PowerDVD 9 or 10 seem to be the best option giving an excellent picture quality and fully compatible with all versions of windows. Interestingly you must get the Ultra version of 9 or 10 for 5.1 sound. 

Some of the Blu-ray drives come bundled with a free copy of PowerDVD but don't expect to get their best version, more likely it will be an older or lesser version.   

Would have been great if Microsoft actually included Blu-ray playback in Windows 7 media centre, but they didn't.

Anyway I've made this post as much as a reminder for me, maybe it will help others too.

  Thanks for putting the post in,  I'm sure most of us will have to upgrade the dvd in the future.  I'm not sure what newer pc's are sold with nowadays.
Carl2