Z61p 9540CTO Advanced Dock to get DVI-D working at 1080p [1920x1080] WUXGA

Question

Please help it is difficult to call Lenovo support and get answers--so this forum is my last resort.
I have a Thinkpad Z61p type 9540-CTO with 4Gb RAM, Core Duo Intel 2.33 Mhz, and ATI Mobility FireGL V5200 512MB WUXGA integrated graphics and DVD MultIburner, and Adv. Dock with DVI pass through feature.
QUESTION 1: 
I would like to know if I purchase a DVI-I to HDMI 1.3 certified cable that it will work to display on a 1080P 46" LCDTV/Monitor?  I need the highest resolution (1920 by 1080) possible to read text from IE or Windows programs from several feet away.
QUESTION 2:
If I upgrade to the ThinkPad Ultrabay Enhanced Blu-ray DVD Burner p/n 43N3200 in the Adv. Dock bay, will I be able to watch BR DVD's correctly or not? (assuming I have the right software player)
Other: The Z61p has XP Pro SP2, BIOS 2.22, Adv. Dock that includes DVI-D graphics pass through port.  I am leary of XPSP3 or Vista based on other negative threads.
Potential issues:
1. [This info is new to me and was not available at time of purchase]  I just possibly learned the Z61P does not "support" Advanced Dock DVI-D: True or False? so will DVI-A or DVI-I function in Adv. Dock? If so what resolution?  
Ref: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-61232 
2.  [This info is new to me and was not available at time of purchase, and Q7300 was not yet available] In the Thinkpad Blue-ray Users Guide it says only the Nvidia Quadro 7300 "supports" 1920 by 1080 without jerking video.  Is this true?   The
Ultrabay Enhanced Blu-ray Burner - Publications Ref:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-69016.html
PS. Undocked on a plane, I also want be able to watch BR DVD's on the internal 15.4" LCD that supports 1920 by 1200. I have several 9 cell batteries already.
I found several conflicting threads with above info with the exact same video card and Adv. Doc that I have except it's about a T not a Z....http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=T_Series_Thinkpads&thread.id=4832
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=22358
Message Edited by IntegrationArch on 06-13-2008 05:06 PM

Answer 1

I don't have any response for your first question, but I might be able to give an answer to your second one.
I have the same laptop with 2GB of RAM and recently took the plunge and bought the Ultrabay Enhanced Blu-ray Burner despite the fact that it explicitly said that it would only work with some R series models. When I initially tried it, Blu-ray playback was unacceptably jerky. Then I discovered that there is a place in the ATI Catalyst Center settings where you can set the video acceleration level of the graphics chipset. There are settings like "optimize for battery life", "optimize for balanced use",  and "optimize for performance". It defaulted to "optimize for battery life" (even in the highest battery profiles, for some reason). When I tried the highest setting, things were very smooth.
I have to qualify my comments a little, though. My main aim in buying the drive was for watching high-def movies from the laptop on long overseas flights. For that reason, most of my experimentation has revolved around playing back movies from the ripped images of Blu-ray discs copied onto the hard drive. (I upgraded to a 320GB hard drive, just for this.) Under those conditions (i.e., playback from hard drive), I can even keep the laptop in the "maximum battery life" power profile and the ATI Catalyst setting to "optimize for performance" still gives me smooth playback with 10 to 20% CPU use. However, I'm not sure how this would be affected if you wanted to play straight from the optical drive. (Probably not much.)
One other thing I should point out is that you may have to play with some settings to get the best image quality while watching Blu-ray discs. This is admittedly not so much a function of the drive itself but more of the software you'd be using and the graphics chipset. I tried the HQV high-def benchmark disc and the initial results were less than stellar. I was using PowerDVD software for Blu-ray playback (WinDVD was unable to play a Blu-ray disc image from the hard drive). Most of my image quality issue seemed to be related to deinterlacing. It turns out that PowerDVD has its own deinterlacing settings, and so does the ATI chipset. I believe I found the best combination by turning the deinterlacing off in the software and allowing it to happen only in the chipset. (Or vice versa; I can look it up to verify, if you need me to.)
My beef with this drive now is finding a solution to give me drive letter access to rewritable Blu-ray discs. I've gotten used to the convenience of this for DVDs and CDs. The software situation for doing this is pretty murky. Nero 8 seems like it might be capable of doing this, but I don't have it and I'm not sure I'd like to buy it yet just for this feature. The other authoring software I already had (Roxio and Sonic DLA) is unable to treat a BD-RE disc like a drive letter, and the software bundled with the drive doesn't seem capable of this either (although it seems like it can write data to a BD-RE disc by defining an explicit session; the old-fashioned way). If you come across any solution for drive letter access to rewritable (or write-once) Blu-ray discs, let me know.