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Blu-ray Licensing to Get Easier and Cheaper
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I doubt this consumer is the target buyer for BR.All these people saying that Blu-ray is dead and that internet-streaming is the future - I hate to alarm you, but there's a big bad world outside of these forums in which people who like to watch quality video don't have computers in their living rooms. Many don't have broadband, and some of them, believe it or nor, don't even own computers
They probably don't know it exists or even care, surely not enough to drop $500 on a lousy box to play $30-$50 single movie discs.
And a computer is not needed for Apple TV or Netflix's service.
TV manufacturers are building in this capability so....
Seems the non computer crowd is best suited to non-physical media.
what stores are these? new standard definition dvds are still $15-$25.
New blu ray discs are not 15-22
Wow, how hard is this to understand? It is a consortium of companies. Each company holds certain patents for the technology. Do you think if Panasonic, for example, has 8 patents, and Sony has 4, and Philips has 3 and so on(obviously these numbers aren't correct), that all the companies will receive the same royalties? No, they won't. And not every company in the consortium is contributing a patent. Which means little to no royalties. If you owned a company that was contributing a third of all patents to a new technology, would you be okay with splitting the royalties with other companies that contributed less or nothing at all? Companies may collaborate, but it doesn't mean that they will all make the same amount of money in the deal.
http://www.digitimes.com/systems/a20080305PD224.html Royalties, royalties, royalties. That's what it's all about. There wouldn't be Blu-ray without royalties.
All these people saying that Blu-ray is dead and that internet-streaming is the future - I hate to alarm you, but there's a big bad world outside of these forums in which people who like to watch quality video don't have computers in their living rooms. Many don't have broadband, and some of them, believe it or nor, don't even own computers
Check back with us in 5 years.
blu-ray is the superior format. and i believe it will be the last optical-based media. the future is going digital download. optical just like the hard drive are going out of date. if blu-ray wants to continue being the last and only optical format, they need more exposure and availability of their format. the ps3 at the moment is holding blu-ray together. the ps4 will be fully digital download-based. blu-ray will be used as a ps3 backward compatible feature and a media center playback device. they better make it cheaper to license bluray playback. if they get the format on computers, it will succeed. if it doesnt make its way to computers, it will not live. the mac professionals are eager for this feature... the future we will see.
I was just making the comment that Psystar actually offers the drive and Apple does not.
I don't see how some people can come on here and try to claim that a Mac is better because it doesn't offer a BD drive. That whole logic of thinking doesn't make any sense to me. If you are a person that hates optical media, then don't use it, but for others that like that option it should be available.
I like Macs and if I didn't I wouldn't own one, but Apple needs to get with the times and offer this to their customers.
I believe there might be something brewing beyond Blu-ray. It's called HVD. It will all depend on how far resolution is taken and how much space is needed. These discs could possibly hold up to 3.9TB of information in the future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_Versatile_Disc
I have purchased a number of blu-rays at Best Buy for under $22.
There are a number of places on the net that offer excellent deals.
Amazon has good deals very frequently.
$500 blu-ray player? There are many half that price.
Where did you get that info about PS4?
Take the media away from the box stores who is going to sell the consoles and accessories?
Totally agree, and if people think digital downloads are the taking over in the near future man their wrong.
Killzone 2 has just come out with some of the most stunning console graphics and guess what they couldn't go lower than 25GBS, only on a BD, couldn't do it on a DVD.
Games designers aren't going to be like ok we now have all this power and storage so what shall we do? Compress our games so that we make it a "manageable" download. No chance. That's just going backwards.
In the future the internet connections will be much more faster. With a 1GB/s download speed, Killzone 2 could have been downloaded for just 25 seconds, with a 500MB/s download speed, 50 seconds, with a 250 MB/s for 100 seconds , with 100MB/s 250 seconds, with 50 MB/s 500 seconds (a bit more than 8 mins) etc. So it doesn't really seem that impossible to me.
C
champ01
Guest
what are you talking about?
blyray aint superior but its damn good
2nd you don't know anything about the future
and tell me is the ps4 comming this christmas?
Which probably sucks hard time other than blueray. Turn on the brain before write.
Jobs said the licensing was difficult and it is, now is it cheaper and simpler as we read.
Blu-Ray just got Pwned.
3.9TB? I wouldn't need an external hard drive ever again.
Saying that though, Panasonic are developing a 2TB SD card for release in 2010, so I still don't see the need for disk media anymore.
I'll just be able to store HD movies on the SD card in my Macbook Pro's SD Multi Card Reader in the Express Card Slot, and then when i want to watch them on my TV slot that into my TV's Multi Card Reader, or when i want to share them with my friend, just slot them in their laptops card reader, but with a BR disk you have to worry about scratching it, burning times, its delicacy, cases, naming it because they all look the same, the expensive cost of them, their one and only single use unless its +-RW etc etc....
Choice is good. I'm selling quite a few laptops with Blu-ray and HDMI. Wish it was availble for my Apple customers.
yeah in the future we will capture the power of the sun and wind.
Who wil be providing the services pushing that much bandwidth? Most providers can barely provide 10Mbits per second. Here you are talking 500MBps. Please tell me you are talking Mbps and not MBps because 500MBps is 40,000 times more information per soecond than 10Mbps.
Afaik the fastest internet connection is 40 Gb/s which is about 5 GB/s download speed. In the future providers may provide something like 100-200 MB/s for a low price.
Never said it was impossible, but what your talking about is 10-15 years off at least i think.
What by? A $15,000 player?
And just when is that "future" supposedly going to show up - in 2020?
The US is ranked somewhere around 15th in terms of our high speed internet rates. Number one is Japan - which is approaching 100MB/S, followed closely by South Korea. The median download speed in the US is a pathetic 2.5 -3.0 MB/s.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/broadband-Internet,news-2326.html
We are being purposely "throttled" by our monopoly ISP's. That will continue, and accelerate, until they - along with the mega Media industries - can institute a "closed" two or three tiered Internet access system. One for Corporate, for-profit media giants like Apple, who will eventually acquire "exclusive" rights to deliver their content at the very highest of speeds (50MB/s ++), and everyone and everything else will be shunted off into tortoise speed pipelines of a couple MB/s, or even less. This tiered system, now being quietly implemented, assures that big Media can do business without any download speed restrictions, and at the same time they can slowly strangle all of the PTP and torrent sites that now threaten their absolute dominance in the delivery of any digital media content not controlled by them.
http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2007/08...he-tiered-internet-whether-we-like-it-or-not/
By not adopting Blu-Ray, Apple is effectively restricting any HD Media content on the Mac to it's very own, exclusive distribution portal: iTunes.
To all of the brain dead, manufactured consented droids on this thread, spouting the Apple Inc. party line that iTunes is "all you need" for HD Video access on the Mac, welcome to your future - circa 1984.
I wonder what ever became of that pretty blond in a track suit, swinging the hammer?
Funny thing is that just this week they tallied up digital download vs physical media when it came to the PS3, 360, and the Wii for a grand total of 1% of software purchased. Before you start spouting about Steam, the AVERAGE consumer fits a lot more closely with consoles than the hardcore crowd that tend to gravitate towards the PC.
No one is saying digital downloads won't come to be a viable option, it just won't be with in the next 5 years like some you delusional individuals seem to think. The reality is we're looking at least 10 years before Digital truly takes hold and by then blu ray has more than run its successful course.
No one is saying digital downloads won't come to be a viable option, it just won't be with in the next 5 years like some you delusional individuals seem to think. The reality is we're looking at least 10 years before Digital truly takes hold and by then blu ray has more than run its successful course.
WOW that says nothing but what I have posted.. I think it is you that does not understand... Yes all 21 have the same amount of money because it is a GROUP not one company...
Yes faster but with a bandwidth cap on usage.. Yes their already have caps on bandwidth is call COMCAST and other ISP are following suit to do the same.. Just because speed gets faster does not mean there well not be caps on how much you can download and stream...
As I have said in previous posts, it is a reasonable assumption that if they are able to increase speeds by that much, they will also be able to increase total capacity of their lines, meaning that you will able to download more, faster. In other words, yes, their will still probably be caps, but I would say it is safe to assume that they will be much higher than they are today (~250GB)
And if digital DL's really do take over, I imagine Crapcast will come out with a package of some sort where you pay more a month to increase or even remove your monthly cap...
Availability of Blu-ray Disk Support on the Macintosh
The availability of Blu-ray disk support on the Macintosh platform is long overdue. We expect state-of-the-art products from Apple, but the current DVD technology represents video standards developed in the late 1940s (480i). DVDs offer double the refresh rate (480p), but no increase in resolution. The quality of both video and audio provided by Blu-ray (1080p video and lossless/uncompressed audio) is orders of magnitude superior to DVD. Most of the current Apple displays support true high definition (1920 x 1080p), as does their video authoring software (iMovie HD and Final Cut Pro).
While Time Machine is a good product, it only backs up susceptible hard drives to susceptible hard drives. The 50GB Blu-ray optical media provides over 10 times more storage than the 4.7 GB available from DVD and is considerably more robust. Toast 10 supports data backup using Blu-ray R and RE disks on Mac Pro computers.
I have a third party (MCE) Blu-ray disk drive in my Intel-based Mac Pro. The only way to play Blu-ray theatrical disks on this computer is to boot into a Microsoft Operating System (XP or Vista). On a 30-inch screen, the image quality will take your breath away. How embarrassing to Apple is this?
The availability of Blu-ray disk support on the Macintosh platform is long overdue. We expect state-of-the-art products from Apple, but the current DVD technology represents video standards developed in the late 1940s (480i). DVDs offer double the refresh rate (480p), but no increase in resolution. The quality of both video and audio provided by Blu-ray (1080p video and lossless/uncompressed audio) is orders of magnitude superior to DVD. Most of the current Apple displays support true high definition (1920 x 1080p), as does their video authoring software (iMovie HD and Final Cut Pro).
While Time Machine is a good product, it only backs up susceptible hard drives to susceptible hard drives. The 50GB Blu-ray optical media provides over 10 times more storage than the 4.7 GB available from DVD and is considerably more robust. Toast 10 supports data backup using Blu-ray R and RE disks on Mac Pro computers.
I have a third party (MCE) Blu-ray disk drive in my Intel-based Mac Pro. The only way to play Blu-ray theatrical disks on this computer is to boot into a Microsoft Operating System (XP or Vista). On a 30-inch screen, the image quality will take your breath away. How embarrassing to Apple is this?
I have to wonder at the people saying regions are bad but supporting iTunes over Blu-ray... I think iTunes is more region-controlled than even DVD was, by virtue of the way the stores are national, not even zoned roughly by continents!
One of HD-DVD's major strengths was its lack of region coding, but I believe it was in the specs for HD-DVD and could have been added later had it won the format war (? correct me if that's wrong anyone, it's academic now anyway).
For example, I bought Stephen Chow's Chinese Odyssey on Blu-ray recently. It doesn't have a UK Region B release, it might never do so. But because it's region free it doesn't matter. If I leave it up to Apple to decide which films are for me and which aren't, based purely on whether the studios and Apple think it's worthwhile for them, I may miss out on many films I want to buy. Everyone who likes foreign films should care about this, regardless of all other arguments. It's not great when there is music on iTunes that isn't available outside of one store, but at least CDs have no regions or DRM.
So anyway,
DVD regions: 0-8 (practically speaking 1-6 for most people)
Blu-Ray regions: A, B, C (and the majority of discs are region free and can be imported from/to anywhere in the world).
iTunes stores: currently 61, divided by nationality.
Imagine if Blu-ray had 61 regions!! People would be going nuts. Yet in iTunes that is ok because it's 'the future', and never mind the quality is worse and the internet isn't up to the task for most people (and unlikely to be for a Blu-ray shaped while).
BTW, I'm not saying Blu-ray's region coding is a good thing, and I really do want a region free BD player as soon as they become more affordable. But using that as an argument for iTunes and against Blu-ray makes no sense to me.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple and Microsoft and maybe others quietly decided between themselves to back different formats to try and kill both off. Apple's membership of the Blu-Ray board / association/ club whatever hasn't really been worth anything much to us mac users yet has it? And Microsoft wimped out when they didn't make an X-Box with a HD-DVD drive built in. The PS3 may still be pricey, but Sony stuck their neck out because they seem to genuinely want Blu-ray to succeed.
It's also funny how Blu-ray is "a bag of hurt" for the mac, but not for Pixar apparently, who have arguably released some of the best-looking Blu-rays discs out there. So another good question might be: Why is Steve Jobs favouring Windows users over Mac users when it comes to media quality?
One of HD-DVD's major strengths was its lack of region coding, but I believe it was in the specs for HD-DVD and could have been added later had it won the format war (? correct me if that's wrong anyone, it's academic now anyway).
For example, I bought Stephen Chow's Chinese Odyssey on Blu-ray recently. It doesn't have a UK Region B release, it might never do so. But because it's region free it doesn't matter. If I leave it up to Apple to decide which films are for me and which aren't, based purely on whether the studios and Apple think it's worthwhile for them, I may miss out on many films I want to buy. Everyone who likes foreign films should care about this, regardless of all other arguments. It's not great when there is music on iTunes that isn't available outside of one store, but at least CDs have no regions or DRM.
So anyway,
DVD regions: 0-8 (practically speaking 1-6 for most people)
Blu-Ray regions: A, B, C (and the majority of discs are region free and can be imported from/to anywhere in the world).
iTunes stores: currently 61, divided by nationality.
Imagine if Blu-ray had 61 regions!! People would be going nuts. Yet in iTunes that is ok because it's 'the future', and never mind the quality is worse and the internet isn't up to the task for most people (and unlikely to be for a Blu-ray shaped while).
BTW, I'm not saying Blu-ray's region coding is a good thing, and I really do want a region free BD player as soon as they become more affordable. But using that as an argument for iTunes and against Blu-ray makes no sense to me.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple and Microsoft and maybe others quietly decided between themselves to back different formats to try and kill both off. Apple's membership of the Blu-Ray board / association/ club whatever hasn't really been worth anything much to us mac users yet has it? And Microsoft wimped out when they didn't make an X-Box with a HD-DVD drive built in. The PS3 may still be pricey, but Sony stuck their neck out because they seem to genuinely want Blu-ray to succeed.
It's also funny how Blu-ray is "a bag of hurt" for the mac, but not for Pixar apparently, who have arguably released some of the best-looking Blu-rays discs out there. So another good question might be: Why is Steve Jobs favouring Windows users over Mac users when it comes to media quality?