While there are people on this forum that know much more than I do i will give you my answers to what i know.
1. If you want to use Powerdvd 12 you will need to have your Blu rays in ISO. I am not sure on TMT
2. i will let someone else give you the answer on this.
3. IMO Powerdvd.
4. Both integrate with WMC.

1. DVD you use folder, blu-ray ISO

2. blu-rays are mounted by virtual clonedrive yes which you must install, its free, you ask mm to play, it tells mounter to mount and autoplay in media centre starts TMT i believe, regardless the result is same.

3. i use and recommend TMT, i found it far better generally.

4. yes TMT 5 and 3 intergrate, get 5 obviously. powerdvd as pffm555 says does also as far as i know.

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My Movies Head Moderator

I'm with Carl.

DVD=folder, BD=ISO (using the free Virtual Clone Drive). I rip DVD's with MyMovies and rip ISO's with AnyDVD*'s inbuilt ripper. I started with PowerDVD as the player and then bought TMT and have standardised on TMT, which has been trouble-free. PowerDVD was not, on my system at least.

The MyMovies bluray experience and DVD experience is similar but not identical. Choose the movie. Play it. The DVD opens in MediaCentre whereas with an iso VCD mounts it as a drive (invisibly to the user) and TMT plays it via an integrated plugin to Media Centre. All automagically.

Note that anydvd* has quite a few options to aid in playing BD's/iso, including a new speedmenu function to make launching the movie much faster. It's a cool feature if you don't want all the BD title menu interactions etc. that can be painful to navigate through. Speedmenu makes launching BD's as fast as launching DVDs.

By far the hardest part (in my opinion) is getting smooth, drop-frame-free 23.976hz playback of BD's. So hard for me that I play back everything at 60hz (DVD's and BD's) since I find that better than the irritation of dropped frames. I'm not even sure that reliable, perfect, set-and-forget 23.976 playback is even possible with today's hardware.

Robin

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