Alienware Hangar 18 to Get Blu-ray by Fall

Earlier this week, Alienware announced its Hangar18 HD Entertainment Center, a PC that's gunning for a spot in your living room's entertainment rack. The system's specs sound enticing--1080p output via HDMI, 2TB of hard drive space, dual-core processor, integrated wireless, and a 5.1 channel audio amplifier with up to 200 watts per channel--and they're packed into a comparatively slim case that will feel right at home with other components in your home. The only thing missing from this package: high-definition recording.

The inclusion of a Blu-ray Disc burner was originally planned for the Hangar18, says product manager Marc Diana. But the company ran into some unexpected difficulties.

"When we first started working on Hangar18, we'd qualified it under Windows XP to work with Blu-ray, and it worked flawlessly," Diana says. However, the company waited for Windows Vista to come out before shipping Hangar18. And when it began to vet the system under Vista, Alienware found that not everything performed as expected. "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."

For its initial launch, Alienware used an alternative graphics option. "We integrated a 7600GS card with onboard HDMI support," explains Diana. "And we implemented an audio bypass so you can utilize the 7600GS video card that supports 1080p, and still get your audio via HDMI."

Bulkier media center systems competing with the Hangar18 tend to use higher end graphics cards inside. But a different card wasn't feasible given the Hangar18's sleek design. "Design was the most important thing to us. We were going for a product that has a sleek, pizza box-like form; it had to be a machine that is living room friendly," emphasizes Diana. "GeForce 8-series cards are huge, they suck up power and energy, and run hot; and they're noisy."

The company intends to add a Blu-ray by end of summer or early fall. For now, Diana says Alienware is still investigating the conflict with AMD and nVidia. "For us not to see some simple video playback is absurd. We're trying to find a happy medium, and to see what is slowing things down," he says candidly. "We're not seeing these issues on the desktop side, but we are on the media center side. The errors we're encountering are very perplexing."

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