Yes, you can dump a Blu-Ray to physical disk.
But you still need the Blu-ray drive to do this do you not? how do you get a Blu-Ray ripped from disc without the medium?
Well, if you look in my signature, it quite clearly says I have a Memorex USB3 BD/DVD/CD drive (I got it for $52 shipped at that). I don't really use it much for BD, though. It gets used more for loading old Windows games (via VMWare with XP and Win98) and the occasional dump of a CD into iTunes than anything else. In short, the Mac Mini doesn't have a drive period. I could either lament this or just get a USB3 drive for cheap. The Mac Mini is hidden behind my two monitors and the Memorex Drive sits vertical mounted between them. I get a consistent black look (between the monitors, drives and speakers and keyboard I have on a dark desk and the Mini is tucked out of site. I still have the full tower nook available under the desk in case I want to share the monitor/keyboard/mouse setup with a dedicated gaming rig or whatever at some stage.
Then, all those very large media files need a bast amount of storage. If you're trying to build an "all in one" machine that can both rip and store blu-rays for digital media playback, you're SOL. With the new Apple
I'm not trying to "all in one" anything. I've got a Mini with external attached storage and internal RAID0 storage. Having the media drive external means if the Mini goes down, I can always temporarily serve it off my Macbook Pro if need be.
paradigm, you will have to buy a 3rd party blu-ray external drive, and then external data storage materials.
This isn't an argument about the new Mac Pro in terms of BD. It's just about BD versus media farming. The Mac Pro is a whole different bag of hurt and the lack of a PCI expansion bus bugs me more than the lack of internal optical drive space. Who buys a Mac Pro as a media server anyway?
Then if you want to watch that blu-ray movie on a TV in a different place in the house? First you need to make sure that the location is wired up properly to handle the amount of data transmission that Blu-Ray media can require.
It's called Ethernet. Of course, I don't personally use it since an encoded 720P version is all I need with my current projector (due to be replaced in the next year or so, though) and I have no trouble sending it across dual-band WiFi.
You need a network media streamer that is capable of running ripped blu-ray media. VLC doesn't run on most network media streaming devices.
Again, I don't personally need that level since I cannot see enough difference worth the misery of using an optical disc (not to mention my downstairs is still using a receiver that only uses component so that has to be upgraded first; a product of putting together a home theater 6 years ago when it wasn't worth the extra expense for HDMI switching and it was 1.0 anyway.
Orrrrr, you can buy a $99 blu-ray player. plug it into your home theatre. insert disc. Watch.
Even that would require a new receiver here (since all newer Blu-Ray with Netflix, etc. require HDMI and even older versions can disable HD output by the disc if the networks decide they feel like screwing you over). Don't forget the next step you didn't list which is to watch the ads, previews and animated menus before you can even get to the movie and if the studios want to force you to watch them, they darn well can. Personally, I can't stand advertising anymore and I don't want to watch movie previews I've seen before for the rest of my life. The trade-offs are simply unacceptable to me. Then there's the search for the disc upstairs/downstairs thing and no ability to watch the same movie on both floors at the same time (which I've done before when I ran out of space downstairs for everyone that came over). You have one disc only. And in my case, I'd have to go buy a lot of Blu-Rays first to play.
But Even I understand that everyones mileage varies and that the Blu-Ray Medium itself is going nowhere.
LOL. That's an amusing thing to say if you think of the ironic double entendre (i.e. the format is going nowhere). Hey, VHS was around for over two decades. That didn't mean I bought few if any movies on that format (a handful of Bogart movies unavailable on any other format at the time is all, really). But then buying Laserdisc in the '90s wasn't much smarter. It was the disc that never wore out and was over 40% sharper than VHS! Yeah, I still have over 100 of those LP-like discs downstairs. I wonder how much they're worth now....
After all, Super Blu-Ray is the next big thing and it means all current BDs will be obsolete once again so they can sell you the same movies all over again. At some point, the relative screen size versus viewing distance makes it seem pointless in a home environment for most people, but these are the same people that think Blu-Ray is like 1000x better than H264 1080p and so no amount of logic or science will convince them that they aren't seeing all that detail. They probably own LPs too since AAC sounds just horrible.
it is completely unreasonable to assume that every movie watcher is going to go out of their way to build themselves such a "whole home" media based system, when the quick, easy and cost effective means already exists and is well established.
No, I think it's more like at some point in the near future, you'll just be able to buy a stand-alone box that downloads movies onto a massive included hard drive and it will automatically stream to other sub-boxes around the house (i.e. imagine Sonus for HD movies). AppleTV isn't too far off the mark here, but requires a server computer which may be too darn technical for the average person. In either case, viewers will have the option of either sitting on their couch and clicking to buy or rent a movie and having near instant satisfaction or driving off to Wal-Mart or wherever to buy a physical disc, only to find they're sold out of Gee-Whiz-Bang and that Hollywood Video is already out of business so they're just plain SOL. Pay-Per-View is already more popular than home video stores and it's only a matter of time before people get completely sick of having to wait for Netflix to send them a Blu-Ray since nobody in the entire state rents them anymore. And just how many movies do people really BUY anyway? DVDs became impulse buys below $10, but I have yet to see the level of market penetration where Blu-Rays are at every grocery store checkout counter like DVDs and frankly, most people buy HDTVs that are like 40-50 inches where it's not even worth bothering with a Blu-Ray if you're sitting 15-20 feet away. It's hardly sharper looking with a set that size at that seating distance. Most people don't have the BIG screens to REALLY appreciate 1080p. I have a 93" screen and 720P looks PHENOMINAL compared to Laserdisc and DVD and frankly looks more "film" like than 1080p at that size (i.e. large movie theaters do not look like a 60" or even a 93" 1080p display at the screen sizes and seating distances, IMO. They're more film like and that's not a bad thing. I'm not sure I want movies to look like an NFL game, but that's where they're heading with Super HD and high frame rate playback.
Basically, I'm saying Blu-Ray is already overkill for the typical "average" person. They're going to appreciate convenience over the last pixel perfection to the nth degree at some point. Just look at how popular music streaming and sales services have become and just how quickly CDs are disappearing from local stores (any good selection at least). There's a very good argument that CDs are better quality (not lossy) than AAC or MP3, but people DON'T CARE for the most part. They want convenience and most can't hear that difference anyway (if there even is one audibly compared to high bit-rate AAC). There has been a push for high-end audio formats (SACD and DVD-Audio). Yeah, they have a few fans, but the reality is in terms of world-wide sales, they're pretty much FAILURES as formats because the average person listening with dirt cheap garbage ear-buds isn't going to appreciate the quality already available on CD or AAC, let alone some super format that may or may not offer better sound (I say it's the mastered recordings that are better since lower rate dumps sound the same; I myself record my own music in 24/96 for head room, but the final mixes sound the same even on my best speakers (Carver ribbons with a custom crossover setup; same setup and drivers used by $50k Genesis IIs).
However, in the case of the new MP's not having Blu-ray internal, I'm really impartial to it. Would it be nice to have an internal media drive so that everything is nice and clean and neat internal? sure, but theres' still the capability of adding one via external connectivity if one is required. To me, the bigger omission and question regarding the MP is the internal storage and upgradability. I know lots of professionals who upgrade their graphics cards regularly cause every measurable increase of performance they can get can potentially save them hours of processing and work time. being
This is precisely my problem with the Mac Pro as well (in other posts here). Thunderbolt 2.0 is no substitute for PCI 3.0 16x slots.
