No Blu-Ray functionality in MediaSmart DVD after upgrade to Win7

[Adrenarush]

From the sounds of other threads on this support forum this has happened to other folks, but I wanted to put this out there to see if anyone can shed some light on this issue.

The machine we have is the HP Pavilion Elite m9600t which includes the Blu-ray Player + SuperMulti DVD Burner with Lightscribe.  The machine was delivered with Vista, but we went ahead and did a clean install of Win7 and installed sp44615.exe which is the update which installed MediaSmart DVD (supposedly with Blu-Ray support).

MediaSmart DVD is installed and running correctly with standard DVD media, but does not recognize a Blu-Ray disc (Terminator Salvation).  We were able to use the Blu-Ray functionality in Win7 with the Cyberlink PowerDVD 9 trial application, but we are unwilling to pay more money to pay for functionality we already paid for when we purchased this machine.

Is there a way to force the MediaSmart DVD install to enable the Blu-ray functionality?  This shouldn't be that hard, right? 

Anyone got an idea?

[Adrenarush]

A bit more detail on this.  The drive that is installed in this machine is the "atapi bd b dh6e2l"

tried another video today, Inglorious Basterds, and still no dice.

[shameless]

you can try opening powerdvd & click the little icon upper left corner of the splashscreen & see if there's an update available, even though mediasmart is playing standard dvd's, you might try uninstalling it & reinstalling it. have you checked the driver & support page for your model # to see if there's any updates there? sounds like you need an upgrade for mediasmart to work with windows 7. can also try going directly to cyberlink.com for updates. it's very frustrating to find a solution, so hang in there.

[Adrenarush]

Thanks for the suggestions, 

The app is up-to-date, and complete uninstall including a registry cleansing and reinstall didn't make a difference.

It seems that getting MediaSmart DVD working with Blu-ray, that the SP44615 identifies it's self as an update.  If it's called an update, it suggests that maybe the program needs to already be installed. 

Can anyone confirm for me if it Is safe to expect that installing SP44615 (MediaSmart DVD Update ) on a clean install of Win7/64bit on an HP machine that came with a Blu-ray player installed (Pav Elite m9600t) would result in a machine capable of playing Blu-ray movies?  or, is there something that would need to be existing on the machine prior to installing this "update"?

[TomT]

I had similar situation as you with an Hp M9520F elite.  After going through 11 layers of "support", finally received personal telephone call from HP that told me tersely and finally that "I should not expect MediaSmart DVD to support BluRay under W7."

Some details on this in another thread in the CD/DVD section.  If you ever get it working, please share how!  HP was NO help.

Tom

[Adrenarush]

Still getting no love from HP on this forum.  Pretty frustrating being an HP customer.  I recently received the HP Vista to Win7 upgrade CDs provided for free since we purchased our PC around the end of December.  Unfortunately they include nothing that seems to update the MediaSmart software on the machine.  Does anyone have BluRay working in Win7?  I assume that Blu-Ray works in MediaSmart DVD in Win7, but there must be something missing from our machine because we did the Win7 upgrade on our own.  

[Adrenarush]

I am wondering if perhaps the following steps might work as painful as they would be.  First, I don't have a recovery CD as I did not create one prior to upgrading to Win7.  Silly me thought that as long as the recovery partition was untouched, that I would still have a fallback.  Little did I know that without the recovery CD, the recovery partition was useless.  In looking at ordering the recovery CD from the support page, the link is a dead-end.

My thinking is that if I am able to recover back to the original machine image with a recovery CD, perhaps I can then use the Win7 upgrade CD I just received and officially upgrade the machine to Win7 with the official HP bits.  Theoretically this should preserve all the functionality I desire.  Unfortunately this will also bring back all the crap, useless machine resource hogging HP software that I don't want on the machine.

Anyone done an upgrade to Win7 with the HP provided upgrade disks and still have Blu-ray working?  Seems like a big waste of time, but definitely less expensive than updating the Blu-ray player to aftermarket software.

really not an HP fan.  Pretty lame way of doing business and treating your customers if you ask me.  Perhaps someone from HP would like to help a customer in need or at least stand up for why HP's business practices are acceptable way of doing business?  I'll be waiting for any of you to respond.  I'm convinced that no HP employees will take me up on that offer.

[DragonflyKing]

I bought a DV7 notebook with blu-ray light scribe running Win7/32 and had issues playing DVDs in MediSmart out-of-the-box but have fixed my problem so hope this helps (cause HP were useless).

First see if you can play DVDs in Windows Media Player. If you can't then maybe your DVD region is not set properly. HP don't set the DVD region in the factory to the country they are shipping to. Wikipeadia will tell you which region you need for your country. To set the region use Control Panel \ Devices and Printers \ DVD/CD-ROM Drives. Right click your drive and select Properties then DVD Region tab. VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: You only get five opportunities to change your DVD region before it is fixed permanently in the firmware of the drive itself.

Firewall issues. My problem was cause by conflicts with Comodo Firewall. Disabling the firewall did not resolve the issue - I had to completely uninstall it. Then MediaSmart played DVDs as expected. I have just bought my first blu-ray disk today and that plays fine too. You will also need to set your region for Blu-Ray. This is done in the settings of MediaSmart DVD itself. Again, Wikipedia is useful to know which region code you will need. Blu-Ray regions are different from DVD regions. Again, you only get five chances to change this.

I only found what was causing my issue by restoring my machine back to factory settings. As I had now set my DVD region I was then able to play DVDs through MediaSmart. I then created a system restore point prior to installing each piece of software and noting if the bad behavior returned.

[Adrenarush]

Update on my issues here with no Blu-Ray.  I took the machines back to as purchased via the System Recovery partition, then went through the Win7 upgrade provided by HP.  Painful process and cost me $16 for a Recovery CD since we didn't create a CD prior to upgrading.  I am happy to report that we have all our functionality back as purchase in the Win7 environment.  Still doesn't explain what it is that keeps MediaSmart from playing Blu-Ray DVD's on a clean install of Win7, but suffice it to say that HP/Cyberlink could have made this problem a heck of a lot easier to correct.  Side benefit (or negative side effect?) is that all the preloaded HP software is back.  Hopefully non of the infamous HP software takes me down next.