Blu-Ray has been around for well over a decade, yet watching a Blu-ray movie on PC still sucks so hard.

To start off with, my PC has no slots for an internal Blu-Ray drive, so I had to go external. Ended up going with something from NextStar along with some LG Internal Drive, which works great. The only thing I can really say works well in this example except for the obnoxious blue light on the enclosure.

Getting the Blu-Ray Drive working was easy; watching a movie was not. Blu-ray movies are encrypted and you can’t watch them easily without paying for software like say, PowerDVD. It’s nice that it’s always included with these drives you buy… Sike.

Depending on the drive you purchase, you might have a disc with software to watch your blu-ray movie or you might not.

Let’s assume you’re lucky and your drive comes with PowerDVD to watch your movies like LG. Unfortunately, it only updates to PowerDVD 14 so any higher, and you have to pay. And has no capabilities for UHD. That’s fine, I don’t have a UHD monitor or drive that can do UHD.

The problem is that PowerDVD is limited in features, and it’s really the only game in town unless you have an option to decrypt the Blu-Ray discs.

But let’s say you stick with PowerDVD, well guess what, if you have something using the Optical Adapter (s.pdif) you’re probably not going to hear sound from it. You know why? Because windows gives an option for apps to take exclusive control over your audio device. So you have to go into Windows Sound settings and turn that off.

And Nvidia did away with their 3D vision stuff, so I dunno if I can even use the 3D discs. Not that it matters much, because 3D TV’s and 3D discs are mostly dead now.

And Jesus, You get so many goddamn ads to upgrade to the latest PowerDVDoodoo version. Why the hell do I even need to upgrade? What am I getting out of this? I don’t need PowerDVD to manage all my media content. I just need it to play blu-ray movies which to its credit, it can do.