Windows 7 Media player will not play back BluRay disc's

Blu-ray licenses cost about US$30, a charge that Microsoft doesn't want to add to the overall bill for Windows 7. And, we assume that the OS maker wants to keep the price down as much as possible, so as not to outrage the millions of Vista users who forked out for their short-lived system.

It's important to realize that the Blu-ray format itself is owned by Sony and not Microsoft. That means there are licensing fees required in order to include Blu-ray playback. There's a number of third party options that allow playback of Blu-ray discs. I have little interest in the format and would use a PS3 if I wanted to watch it so I don't think it's necessary to have the cost of Blu-ray playback rolled into the cost of the operating system when anyone who wants such ability can pay for a program that does it.

Microsoft employees are not likely allowed to give you such an answer as it would sound bad coming from them to say, "Well, not every customer wants to pay so *you* can watch Blu-ray discs". The third party option is the right way to handle it.

The fullscreen problem seems like something related to the player. Are your monitors running at 1920x1080 resolution (the common resolution of Blu-ray discs)? That could be one reason.

Poweredvd 9 Ultra  can be multichannel if you have the supported (expensive) soundcards recommended on their website.  Blu Rays mostly play very well in Windows  7 when running pdvd 9  standalone.  However, my early experience is that although Powerdvd also integrates into media centre it seems to only display video within a very annoying border, so that the videoa is restricted from using the full screen.  At least I have not found a way to show palyback full screen except when running pdvd9 without media centre.

Seems to me that the support from microsoft on this subject it is pretty poor.

Powerdvd 9 Ultra works fine in full screen mode for Blu Ray playback when the program is lanched directly from all programs, but when launched from within Media Centre the resulting playback has a border right round the video restricting playback so that you can not get the video to use full screen.  I am trying to identify the integration problem that I am experiencing.

Cyberlink Support gave me this response to my query:

"In response to your concern we want to inform you that when you play a Blu-Ray disc within media center, PowerDVD just provides the codecs to media center and not the PowerDVD interface.If you are not getting full screen view within media center, you can contact Microsoft to get assistance as there might be a possibility that the media center interface does not support the full screen view."All other video (avi, mkv), dvd discs all play perfectly within media centre full screen.