Waiting for WinDVD v10.
Purchase a consumer grade Blu-ray player ($250 + $150 for cables, an HDMI switch, and rack mounts). Note: the hardware cost of upgrading the HTPC to support Blu-ray (exclusive of software) is about $900. My system board is failing (3 plus years old) and I will have to replace the video card (AGP), processor (socket 478), memory (DDR1), and power supply (ATX 20 pin) along with the system-board this year. There is not much sense of not being Blu-ray capable, so that eats up the bulk of the $900
.I was a beta tester for WinDVD v3 and have used WinDVD for, what seems like, over a decade. I prefer to stay WinDVD centric because it is designed with a 2' UI in mind and plays my DVR files. A 10' UI is counterproductive in my environment. Note: consumer equipment and Windows Media Edition have a 10' UI.
I will not purchase v9 as things stand, because: It does not seem likely that it will work in my environment, my system does not get better technically or operationally improved enough to warrant the pain of migration, there is no technical support, I cannot test without purchase and hardware upgrade, v9 dropped the ¡§pan and scan¡¨ feature of v6 and v8 which I use to un-letter-box NTSC MPEG-2 recordings (files) from my DVR's (my primary use of WinDVD).