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Alienware's Hangar18 to get Blu-ray by fall

9 June 2007 5:12 by James "Dela" Delahunty | 3 comments

We reported a few days ago about Alienware's Hangar18: HD Entertainment Center that allows you to record and play back high-definition content in up to 1080p via an HDMI output, delivers the pristine audio quality of an onboard 5.1 surround sound amplifier and offers up to 2TB of hard drive space to store a lifetime's worth of digital media content. However, the inclusion of a Blu-ray burner was originally planned for Hangar18, but the company ran into difficulties.

"When we first started working on Hangar18, we'd qualified it under Windows XP to work with Blu-ray, and it worked flawlessly," product manager Marc Diana said. However, the company waited for Windows Vista before releasing Hangar18, and discovered during testing that everything wasn't working as it should be.

"What we saw was that the Blu-ray playback support wasn't working correctly with our integrated nVidia 6150 graphics. The nVidia 6150 is a great integrated graphics choice because it has on-board HDMI support and PureVideo support; it's the most recent integrated chipset on an HDMI-supported board. But we saw stuttering with the Blu-ray playback. It would look like frames were being skipped," Diana said.

For initial launch, the company integrated integrated a 7600GS card with onboard HDMI support. Other media centers on the market use higher end graphics cards, but the sleek design of the Hangar18 prevented the company from using more powerful cards. "GeForce 8-series cards are huge, they suck up power and energy, and run hot; and they're noisy," Diana said.

The company intends to bring Blu-ray to Hanger18 by the end of the summer, but for now is still investigating the conflict with AMD and nVidia.

Source:
PC World

Permalink to this article

ArcSoft supports NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology (1 September 2007)

Alienware offers Hangar18 HD Entertainment Center (5 June 2007)

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Discuss this article!
borhan9 (AfterDawn Addict) 9 June 2007 17:23
Just another Vista update. [ + quote]
Moomoo2 (Member) 10 June 2007 11:55
That is a pretty hot looking machine. [ + quote]
Unfocused (Member) 30 July 2007 21:26
If all of the next gen devices looked as sleek as this that would be nice. All of the first gen HD and Blu Ray players just looked ugly. Reminded me of the Blaupunkt car stereos a few years ago. [ + quote]