I recently was watching I am legend on blueray using powerdvd. When I tried to turn the directors commentary on by changing the audio track to audio track 2 the sound immediatly became much richer ....but was still missing the directors commentary

After scratching my head a bit (and finding the "show information" option) I figured out audio track 1 is dolby digital 5.1 640kbps (static) and that audio track 2 is dolby truehd 5.1, this fluctuates but runs at over 2000kbps in the car scene and sounds alot richer (enough difference for me to want to rewatch some movies )

Ive since tried this with lcpm?and this also sounds nicer than the one powerdvd keeps defaulting to. Is there a way to make powerdvd default to the higher audio format automatically? Every bluray I have tried sofar defaults to dd 5.1 instead of lcpm or truehd and I keep having to manually select it by trying different audio tracks.

I think PDVD just uses the default track defined by the disc.

No idea why some title manufacturers insist on defining the poorest track as the default.

I always start PDVD with Show Info enabled, then disable it once I have the right soundtrack defined. Also always choose Setup in the menu prior to Playing the movie to ensure I have the soundtrack I want enabled. You can toggle through the soundtracks using the Show Info to determine when you reach the desired one, but by that time the movie has got part way through and you have to skip back to the beginning, which is very disruptive.

I can understand why so many want to rip only the movie with desired soundtrack as it is much easier to get what you want playing from the start: Bluray discs are slow to startup, frequently have garbage before the movie and often require a slow menu operation to setup things the way you want. Bluray is very consumer unfriendly for the important stuff and BD-live a worthless gimmick.

Ah well guess I will keep manually changing the audio I guess - this bdlive.... is that called "moovielive" in powerdvd? that moovielive is the most annoying harrassing option in powerdvd i think, just when you think it has finally turned off....it comes back and wants to remix my movies etc arghhh lols

BD-live is the capability to play extra material accessed from the internet as though it was on the original disc: it's part of the BD spec. PDVD's moovielive is something else entirely.

It sounds like you are using PowerDVD 8, if you are getting that moovielive garbage. I understand there are hacks to get around it that can be found on a popular AV forum, or you can use PowerDVD 7.3

It's really a shame that HD-DVD never survived: with AnyDVD HD, it was easy to edit the .xml navigation file to define any soundtrack as the default, even for original disc playback. With BD using a more complicated Java implementation, such user modifications are not as easy to accomplish (if at all).

cheers, if that moovielive pops up again I think I will just use PDVD 7.3 (after reading about 7.3 vs 8 I think powerdvd 7.3 wins hands down anyway lols)

LCD.... lowest common denominator.......

It's like DVDs defaulting to stereo rather than dolby 5.1. I was playing a recently recently released PAL DVD (André Rieu live in Australia) and the default was stereo.