Blu-ray Licensing to Get Easier and Cheaper

[megfilmworks]

Physical media is dead, and BR discs are part of the past.
Environmental concerns in manufacturing and waste disposal,
cost of distribution and production
(not to mention inventory production guestimates and warehousing),
impulse buying, media servers in households and business,
multiple non-physical copies protected from theft instead of a piece of plastic.
The list goes on.
Whether it is snail mail, paperless billing, or A/V media, it is over.
The times they are a changing and BR is mired in the past.

 

[darrellishere]

Blu-Ray Pis**s over Downloads!

Will we see blu-Ray support in Snow Leopard.

Great for all of us who already use, our blu-ray drive's over in Windows LOL!

Mind you, the 3rd party software, Cyber Link is Amazing for image quality!

It will be hard to match, hardware off loading to the GPU, etc! (Nividia)!!!


We haven't heard anything about apple implementing this type of support

into Snow Leopard, or the dvd player being re-written?

Personally I don't see it happening! Any Time SOON!

It doesn't fit with apples high margins policy!

 

[Krevnik]

Blu-Ray is a borndead standard and this move just proves it. They are desperate to sell DRM-ridden discs to people that could not care less about a marginal increase in image quality.

DVD actually had similar licensing problems initially, which got sorted out about the time that it was launched publicly. The difference is that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD were in a rush to market to beat each other to the punch, rather than taking their time with the format. DVD was actually around for nearly half a decade before it publicly launched and took off.

Fixing the same stupid mistake twice just means they can't seem to learn from their mistakes. It doesn't prove Blu-Ray is a born-dead standard (even if it is).

 

[jbernie]

We will have to wait and see if Apple is willing to adopt, but certainly we should be able to view this as a positive step in that direction, it is also about time the manufacturers realized the benefits of making the licensing a single payment to a single group and that should hopefully encourage further adoption in general.

 

[Hugh]

Some people actually prefer owning a physical copy of a movie, and if w3e want the "slightly better" image capibility of BR disks, us as apple owners should have the right to burn BR disks on our macs....without having to run bootcamp and burn BR on Windows. Sometimes people like to save things on more than a (external) hard drive.
No matter how much apple wants us to download, there are some people like me that want more than one option!

You can already burn Blue-Ray on the Mac. You just need the drive and Toast 9.


Hugh

 

[RichardI]

It's odd that lots of other manufacturers of computer equipment have found a way through the licensing "maze". And most of them without nearly the resources that Apple has. Odd.

Rich

 

[mattster16]

That all depends. The people who train themselves to notice the differences probably aren't actually watching the movie....they just keep staring at the picture telling everybody else how clear it is.

That's like saying people with bad vision don't really have bad vision. "They don't need glasses, they just need to take in their surroundings as a whole instead of training themselves to focus on the visual clarity of the world around them."

 

[rockosmodurnlif]

A new licence will be established by mid-2009 as a "one-stop shop" for device makers. The licence will include all necessary Blu-ray, DVD and CD patents for selling Blu-ray players.

It wasn't like that from the beginning? Who's running the ship over there?

I'm starting to care about having a Blu Ray drive in my Mac now because I finally got an HDTV a month ago. Now that I'm buying my movies on Blu Ray instead of DVD, I have no way of ripping them to my iPod.

Here
Of course you still need something to break the encryption.

 

[spark343]

For sale:

Buggy whips.

 

[Jetson]

Regarding the 10-bit well we can all wish but you don't really need 10-bit for Bluray 8-bit is enough. You would have to have a very good eye to tell the difference unless your looking at a perfect gradient of colours at like a million shades.

My point is, step 1: Just add Bluray the LCD's aren't an issue that needs to be corrected for Bluray. That should be corrected just in general.

No you don't need an eagle's eye to see the difference between millions of colors and billions of colors. If you are aware of the issue of color banding, anyone can perceive it quite easily on 8-bit panels.

 

[bug67]

This is great news for me, cause I just can't see buying a Mac laptop without a blu-ray drive. It just ain't happening.

 

[SactoGuy18]

I believe that there is pressure from people editing high-definition video on Macs for the ability to master Blu-ray discs on a Mac with a built-in BD-RE drive.

Given that the current hardware on Macs are almost ready for Blu-ray support anyway, adding in a BD-RE Superdrive plus some minor add-ons to MacOS X 10.5.x will make an iMac or Mac Pro capable of mastering Blu-ray discs or play back Blu-ray movies. Besides, if you play back Blu-ray movies on an iMac or Mac Pro with an Internet connection, it's a cinch to get even BD-Live support.

 

[J71]

And we can tell that this is the case because they've improved the licensing for Blu-Ray, right? Yeah, whatever. Your logic doesn't tie into this article at all. Blu-Ray is doing well and growing, and nothing is going to replace it as the next generation standard for HD video now--not until something much better comes along the way may years down the road.

I wouldn't call the increase in quality marginal if you've got a nice television. Especially if you're watching something from Pixar, or a nature film like Planet Earth.

Oh definitely. I have only had a Blu-Ray player for a few months. I rented Pixar's "Cars" on Blu-ray (Blu-Ray is only $1 more per month on Netflix) and compared it with my current copy on DVD and I noticed a dramatic difference in clarity compared to DVD. IMHO, if you have a nice 1080p HDTV, Blu-ray is worth the upgrade.

 

[digitalbiker]

For Sale:

Buggy whips.

Apple TV's.

 

[hummerZ]

I'm sorry, but to those of you who are saying that Blu-ray was born dead, or that physical media is extinct, you are wrong.

Blu-ray Disc may not entirely supplant DVD as the primary optical media for home entertainment, but it is bound to find a sure footing, due simply to the fact that the data rate and storage capacity is an IMMENSE improvement over DVD. This not only provides a huge improvement in image resolution, but also image quality, depth, contrast, and color representation.

For those who have mentioned something along the lines of not needing Blu-ray because they can watch iTunes in HD, I think you need to check your television (or your eyes) because the data compression artefacting from almost all downloaded content is simply inferior to Blu-ray.

However, perhaps the biggest improvement in BD over DVD is the audio quality. The option for uncompressed/lossless audio is nothing short of amazing when compared to the antiquated technology of Dolby Digital (which is what is on your DVDs, and in your DTV broadcasts)

Also, why are region restrictions such a problem? DVDs have always been region coded.

Blu-ray is amazing. Get with the times!

 

[darrellishere]

In all fairness, Blu-ray should go on the Next 24" iMac,

Mac Pro,

15" Macbook Pro & 17"!

15" macbook Pro should recieve a resolution bump, to meet the specifications.

P.S

Apple upgrading all of their cheap as chips TN screens! Seems Unlikely!

And to HummerZ! Man You Said it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Blu Ray is amazing. Get with the times people!

 

[lkrupp]

This is great news for me, cause I just can't see buying a Mac laptop without a blu-ray drive. It just ain't happening.

I don't mind as long as the Blu-ray drive is optional. I don't want to pay for obsolete technology that is on its way out. Apple should drop optical drives the way they did 3.5 floppies. A few screwballs will scream bloody murder but that's okay. I haven't used the optical drive on my iMac for many months now, let alone burn anything. It's just not needed anymore.

 

[Jetson]

Optical drives and Blu-ray are most certainly NOT dead.

Where do you people get these notions anyway?

Just because YOU aren't using it doesn't automatically mean that the ENTIRE WORLD is doing the same.

 

[megfilmworks]

Optical drives and Blu-ray are most certainly NOT dead.

I agree,
just terminal and on life support, like all physical media.

 

[digitalbiker]

What Apple really needs to do is;

1) Kill the Apple TV.
2) Improve mini CPU.
3) Improve mini Ram.
4) Improve mini GPU.
5) Add BD drive and burner to mini.
6) Add HDMI and display port to mini.
7) Build multitouch, wii like controller with remote for mini.
8) Advertise mini as your media entertainment 1 box solution. Games, itunes movies, audio books, BD player / recorder, Tivo, itunes music, etc.

This would make more sense, than keeping two lame products around to die on the vine. Steve still refers to AppleTV as a hobby, ridiculous!

 

[wetrix]

Physical media is not dead. CD sales still smash digital sales for music because they are higher quality, have no stupid restrictions, work with everything, are almost as cheap and can be resold when you're done with them. Also, my mom can understand how they work.

Just like people who say MS is dead, your ubernerd approach to technology doesn't represent the majority of the market. People will buy Microsoft and DVDs and Blu-Rays because they work as expected. I'm quite ubernerdy, but I'll still never pay for a movie or album that I can't offload to somebody else or use anywhere.

 

[kastenbrust]

That is if you live in the US or Europe. But if you live elsewhere in the world, there are still people on dial up. And huge countries that still don't have their iTunes Store (like Brazil, the 10th largest economy in the world). So, while you are not thinking really globally, I guess Apple might be.

and people who live with dial up can afford blu-ray disks

riiiiiight yes whatever.

I LMAO when I see people that keep saying that High Speed Internet will increasing in speed.. But you forget one thing, as the speed get faster more and more will start putting caps on your bandwidth usage.. Do not believe me check out Comcast they doing right now and other IPS are following right be hide them.. So the more you stream and download the more you use up your bandwidth.. So if you think just because you have speed up to 32MMB you will have a cap on your bandwidth usage.. All that speed is not going to help you out when you use up you bandwidth usage just to download 50GB a movie... So do not come crying in the future when you used up your bandwidth because of streaming and downloading 50GB HD movies...

Thats against European business competition laws so it wont happen here, some companies are currently doing it (Such as Orange and BT) but they got hit with big fines so we're seeing it less and less know. Guess its only going to stick in the US where you have IT comms lobbyists laughing in the face of your 'democracy'. My broadband is 52MB and its got no bandwidth usage limit and it costs me in dollars about $30 per month, and so thats why i think digital media is the future. Its also got no bottlenecks on torrent ports which rules

 

[numbersyx]

Long overdue in my book (if it happens). Apple has let other companies steal a march on them with this one and need to rectify it....

 

[Shiner]

The point is: BR hasn't shown its marginal value. Nobody cares about it, unless you have a gigantic screen to count the pixels...and I won't pay extra for a movie that can't copied to other media support devices unless DVDs really disappear from the market, which won't happen anytime soon.

Blu-Ray is DEAD. Just like Microsoft.

You are not serious right? Please tell me you are just trying to get a rise out of the community. A ton of people care about this.

 

[Porco]

I really want a Mac with Blu-ray movie playback in, so this is a positive step towards that being more likely, I hope.