[scottchicken]

Hi,

To go with a new TH-P50V20A plasma I'm buying an ASROCK 330 IONHT-BD and will be installing XBMC Live on its hard disk.

I do not want to buy a standalone bluray disc player as I will very rarely be playing an actual physical bluray disc (probably only if a visitor brings one over to play). So I'm getting the 330HT-BD on the assumption that one day disc playback will perhaps be supported, but in the meantime am hoping to enable a solution to play discs outside of XBMC Live.

Using commercial software (e.g. powerdvd or whatever) is fine as well as booting a seperate OS to do so. I'm thinking perhaps a USB boot stick that I can insert and just boot a bluray disc player straight off when needed.

Thoughts or solutions appreciated...

[teaguecl]

Unless you really like the Bluray menu's, I'd suggest just ripping your discs to .mkv format and playing them natively in XBMC. Otherwise, as you noted, you'll need to boot into Windows and run a commerical bluray playback software.
Support for bluray will make it to Linux and XBMC eventually, but honestly I don't know how close it is and I don't care since ripping the movies works well enough for me.

[poofyhairguy]

I 100% support teaguecl's message.