Blu-Ray Support at Macworld? Mac Pros Soon?

[jpine]

How many pro users will actually use the new MacPro systems?

Me for one. But only when DVDSP5 is a reality. I would expect BD support what has been holding up the next release of DVDSP. It has been a very, very long time.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Do you actually own HD-DVD and Blurary software/hardware? Because you clearly have no idea what you are talking about. HD-DVD has had stellar transfers from the start. 30GB is MORE than enough to fit HD media. Considering Bluray discs are maxing out at 50gb and there are 51GB HD-DVD discs, what is your argument? That the inefficient MPEG2 codec and uncompressed audio that Sony continues to push on everyone, requires immense amounts of space? Well then you'd be correct.

100 GB BD discs are hitting the market this year.

 

[dAlen]

#1 - The disk with the most space and less layers preferable.
I see everytime a layer transition happens - so if HD-DVD is boasting more space, but on 3-5 layers (i.e.), then I dont want it.

#2 - Again, more space. Check out www.red.com
Nice 4k camera, and when you compress that material down you will need space and something that can help that medium shine. (But the medium may not be what we think...see below)

#3 - The way of the future is through downloads.
Disc will be a storage medium, so then it wont really matter who wins the format war, in this case both can win...and digital downloads will happen. Technology isnt going to stop.

#4 - We are all going to be projecting 4k material shot on the likes of the red camera (link above), on our own screens at home.

#5 - One day we will put on some special glasses and be part of the movie, doing away with this archaic technology.

Point is, yes, the larger the space the better.
Fact is, BAck when Blue Ray was announced, there was another company who had a disk that would hold like 1Terrabyte of space. Of course the big name companies push to the consumer something a bit lower spec, but higher than what they are used to. And they milk them for what it is worth.

So for the time, Blue Ray seems to have more space with less intrusive layers to have to sit through in a movie. (yes, you may say its seemless...great, Im happy for you...I havent seen it.)

Peace

dAlen

 

[V.K.]

American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu cites sources who say that Apple will start shipping some of their computers with Blu-ray support as early as Macworld.

Appleinsider also corroborates the report with their own sources, expecting an overhaul to the Mac Pro in the 1st quarter of 2008 with Blu-ray support.

Mac Pro updates have been long overdue with the last major update almost 17 months ago. While some rumors have pegged the Mac Pro update at Macworld, there has been only minimal buzz about it in the final weeks before the expo.

Article Link

Minimal buzz? Try no buzz at all. Except for that one hardmac story a month ago there have been exactly zero rumors predicting a mac pro update at macworld.
I can only hope Q1 doesn't mean march 31st. I want a new Mac Pro yesterday!

 

[twoodcc]

i really hope it's true. i think apple needs to have hi-def support

 

[monkeytap]

Here are just a couple of problems with your post:
1. Sony no longer uses MPEG-2 as their primary video encoder. They have been using primarily AVC (which VC-1 is a knock-off of) for almost a year.
2. There is nothing wrong with MPEG-2 with the exception that more bits are needed to encode at the same quality as VC-1 and AVC. MPEG-2 with 50 GB can produce a perfect HD picture.
3. No, 3 hour movies do not fit "just fine" on 30 GB. In fact they have to seriously cripple either the encode or the extras to fit the movie on 30 GB.
4. There is no difference in cost for authoring an HD DVD vs a BD. BD discs are actually cheaper (per GB) to produce. The costs to produce both with drop considerably over the next year so your point is moot to begin with.

haha, he doesn't listen...but yes, hit him with a dose of the truth.

yes, I love that he is still defending that the amount of space is plenty when its actually not. None of the extras will be in HD, or the audio will be ******, or there will be 3 discs....pick your poison, its not enough space for the next generation format.

in any case, more space is better.

100 GB BD discs are hitting the market this year.

I already told him that, and I will just go ahead and say they will play on current players....if he wants to disprove me he can try, but I did read the 100 GB discs will only take a firmware update for players to read.

 

[JFreak]

One day we will put on some special glasses and be part of the movie, doing away with this archaic technology.

Skip the glasses, that's as archaic as it gets (optics-wise). One day movies are encoded in such a way it directly interacts with our nerves which would interpret it in 3D. Then we wonder why our pets don't like to be in the living room while we watch movies...

 

[donlphi]

How many pro users will actually use the new MacPro systems?

I have a 933 Mhz Quicksilver G4 that is on it's last legs. I have about $4000 saved up burning a hole in my pocket and it's going to go towards a new Mac Pro (as soon as they upgrade). I think the performance gap is starting to get smaller between the Mac Pro and iMac, but I like the expandability of a tower vs. an all-in-one solution.

The fact that my Quicksilver is still kicking with 1TB of HD space, running Leopard, wireless N (thanks to Quickertek), while connected to a huge beautiful Apple monitor (thanks to a graphics card update) is reason enough to go with the Mac Pro when the time is right.

The problem with the iMac is no expandability. Try swapping out a hard drive in an old iMac. It's like breaking into Fort Knox. You can't add any pci cards when your USB 1.1 (or name any other port) goes out of date. Maybe the new iMacs are a bit easier to deal with. The biggest problem I could imagine is going without a computer for 2 weeks while Apple replaces the screen in my iMac.

Maybe I'm way off here... I should probably take a hard look at the new iMacs.

 

[mixel]

Go Blu-Ray! 50GB backups yay! (and potentially bigger down the road)

Burning things to run on the PS3 would be nice too. The PS3 supports DivX playback now.. Think how good that would be or EyeTV+PS3 users.

I thought current HD-DVD player didn't support the in-production 3-layered discs? wouldn't splitting an already un-establised format into two types be a really bad idea? (applies to BD too..)

Wikipedia "Hitachi has recently showcased 100 GB Blu-ray Disc, which consists of four layers containing 25 GB each. Unlike TDK and Panasonic's 100 GB disc, this disc is readable on standard Blu-ray drives" - So, that's good.

Combinaion (THD) BD/HD-DVD drives would/will be best.. The formats aren't different enough to warrent all the hate between the two camps.

 

[overcast]

Here are just a couple of problems with your post:
1. Sony no longer uses MPEG-2 as their primary video encoder. They have been primarily using AVC (which VC-1 is a knock-off of) for almost a year.
2. There is nothing wrong with MPEG-2 with the exception that more bits are needed to encode with the same quality as VC-1 and AVC. MPEG-2 with 50 GB can produce a perfect HD picture.
3. No, 3 hour movies do not fit "just fine" on 30 GB. In fact they have to seriously cripple either the encode or the extras to fit the movie on 30 GB.
4. There is no difference in cost for authoring an HD DVD vs a BD and BD discs are actually cheaper (per GB) to produce. The costs to produce both with drop considerably over the next year so your point is moot to begin with.

1. Ok, so what? Why are 50GB "needed" then?
2. I didn't say there was anything wrong, I was merely pointing out the fact that it was highly inefficient and that was the reason for such high disk space requirements. And the reason why everyone Blu-Ray argues it.
3. Encodes are not seriously crippled on any 3 hour movie. King Kong received rave reviews on both Audio and Video. Who gives a **** about extras? You can throw them on a separate disc.
4. For a period of time, it was at least double to manufacture a physical Blu-Ray disc. You may be right in the long term, but that goes for everything. THe players are still significantly cheaper in HD-DVD camp.

 

[SheriffParker]

Finally another Mac Pro rumor! I really hope there's a good update at macworld. I might be interested in buying one...

 

[JFreak]

For a period of time, it was at least double to manufacture a physical Blu-Ray disc. You may be right in the long term, but that goes for everything. THe players are still significantly cheaper in HD-DVD camp.

In Finland they sell HD-DVD players for 249 and cheapest Blu-Ray players go for 400 euros. I've been waiting for a price drop but so far no luck.

 

[overcast]

haha, he doesn't listen...but yes, hit him with a dose of the truth.

yes, I love that he is still defending that the amount of space is plenty when its actually not. None of the extras will be in HD, or the audio will be ******, or there will be 3 discs....pick your poison, its not enough space for the next generation format.

in any case, more space is better.



I already told him that, and I will just go ahead and say they will play on current players....if he wants to disprove me he can try, but I did read the 100 GB discs will only take a firmware update for players to read.

I really must know the setup you are doing your critical listening and viewing on. Because it's been said time and time again, that the difference between "crappy" DD+ and TrueHD/Uncompressed is almost nonexistent. Transformers was the big one that everyone was up in arms about. Here is an excerpt from DVD Talk regarding this release. If no one can tell the difference, what is the difference. Especially considering the fact the ratio of people with displays capable of viewing HD properly, is astronomically higher than people with audio setups capable of hearing the nuances in lossless audio. Look what happened to DVD Audio and Super Audio. The majority of the population just does not care, or does not have the capability to deal with highend audio. Even on my respectable system, I can not tell the difference A/B switching the tracks. Audio is, sadly, just not important. I think it's pretty clear by the proliferation of BOSE and widespread MP3 usage.

The Audio:
Although Paramount has used lossless audio on a few of their other releases, the space of everything they wanted to include in this set meant that instead of including a Dolby True HD or a DTS-HD MA track, they went for a Dolby Digital Plus track encoded at 1.5 mbps. There's been a lot of buzz about the difference between 1.5 mbps DD+ and Dolby True HD, with many knowledgeable people saying that there is no audible difference even on professional equipment, while others claim to be able to hear the difference right in their own homes. I was very vocal about my outrage that Transformers, which aims to be a benchmark HD DVD, does not feature a lossless track of any kind. But now, having heard the audio for myself, I can understand why professional film mixers, HD DVD technical directors, and more claim that the difference is negligible.

Put simply, this 5.1 Dolby Digital Plus track rocks hard. The level of aural detail is most impressive. I could hear every click and whine of the transforming parts, the grinding of metal when the robots fought, and even the startup sound of the 360 when it comes alive. During big action sequences, the surrounds were often used to assault the senses, but I noticed that the mixers would often use the rears for isolated sounds that they wanted to highlight, such as Frenzy's gibbering when he's on Air Force One. The bass has to be felt to be believed. At times it was so thunderous that I thought it might actually affect my bowels. Everything about this track just screams "REFERENCE!" and it holds up easily to the best PCM and True HD mixes that I have heard. Call me a doubter no more.

 

[zetsurin]

Do you actually own HD-DVD and Blurary software/hardware? Because you clearly have no idea what you are talking about. HD-DVD has had stellar transfers from the start. 30GB is MORE than enough to fit HD media. Considering Bluray discs are maxing out at 50gb and there are 51GB HD-DVD discs, what is your argument? That the inefficient MPEG2 codec and uncompressed audio that Sony continues to push on everyone, requires immense amounts of space? Well then you'd be correct.

Yeah, because we all know that compressed audio must be better than uncompressed audio. WTH? I'd take the bigger format and get as much uncompressed/compressed lower as possible. Less loss! As for MPEG2, well all the blu-rays I have are H264. I don't give two hoots who had what from the start, I'm buying titles for the now.

You want the format with the highest compression? Stick with VCDs!

 

[JFreak]

Uncompressed is always better than lossy compression. Always! Even if 90% would not care, there is always that 10% who care. Too bad majority rules (that's why US has idiot as a leader).

 

[overcast]

Yeah, because we all know that compressed audio must be better than uncompressed audio. WTH? I'd take the bigger format and get as much uncompressed/compressed lower as possible. Less loss! As for MPEG2, well all the blu-rays I have are H264. I don't give two hoots who had what from the start, I'm buying titles for the now.

You want the format with the highest compression? Stick with VCDs!

Ever heard of Lossless compression before?

 

[diamond.g]

Why is the argument over hd dvd and bd? So Apple includes BD support in FCP. If they don't have displays that support HDCP (external) or PVP (protected video path) then it is all a moot point as you wont get full rez anyways. Do we as Mac users want a Vista-slow machine?

 

[hjelmn]

1. Ok, so what? Why are 50GB "needed" then?
2. I didn't say there was anything wrong, I was merely pointing out the fact that it was highly inefficient and that was the reason for such high disk space requirements. And the reason why everyone Blu-Ray argues it.
3. Encodes are not seriously crippled on any 3 hour movie. King Kong received rave reviews on both Audio and Video. Who gives a **** about extras? You can throw them on a separate disc.
4. For a period of time, it was at least double to manufacture a physical Blu-Ray disc. You may be right in the long term, but that goes for everything. THe players are still significantly cheaper in HD-DVD camp.

Bigger discs are not needed for every release but it is nice that studios can fit 5 episodes of a 1-hour 1080p tv show on a 50 GB disc where a 30 GB disc can only hold 3. Or better yet with a 50 GB disc a a whole season of an SD tv show can fit on one disc. Why should the consumer settle for less space?

I don't really care about the extras either but many HD DVD supporters talk about superior extra yet they are all in SD because they ran out of disc space.

As for HD DVD players being cheaper. They aren't much cheaper anymore in the US. The price difference has fallen to $250 (1080p BD player) vs $200 (1080i HD DVD player). The movies cost about the same so what advantage does HD DVD really have anymore?

It will be great if Apple adds a BD drive option. That option is about the only thing that would convince me to upgrade from my power pc based mac.

 

[sjobs@mac.com]

Do you actually own HD-DVD and Blurary software/hardware? Because you clearly have no idea what you are talking about. HD-DVD has had stellar transfers from the start. 30GB is MORE than enough to fit HD media. Considering Bluray discs are maxing out at 50gb and there are 51GB HD-DVD discs, what is your argument? That the inefficient MPEG2 codec and uncompressed audio that Sony continues to push on everyone, requires immense amounts of space? Well then you'd be correct.

EDIT: I guess I was late to the party. All my points have been addressed.

 

[CWallace]

The formate war is going to end the same way the DVD+R and DVD-R format war ended and that is with dual mode players.

HP just released a BluRay+HD-DVD playing (not recording) Lightscribe unit on one of their Windows Media Center PCs and Samsung, I think, released one for the home.

 

[monkeytap]

1. Ok, so what? Why are 50GB "needed" then?
2. I didn't say there was anything wrong, I was merely pointing out the fact that it was highly inefficient and that was the reason for such high disk space requirements. And the reason why everyone Blu-Ray argues it.
3. Encodes are not seriously crippled on any 3 hour movie. King Kong received rave reviews on both Audio and Video. Who gives a **** about extras? You can throw them on a separate disc.
4. For a period of time, it was at least double to manufacture a physical Blu-Ray disc. You may be right in the long term, but that goes for everything. THe players are still significantly cheaper in HD-DVD camp.

and cost is a technical advantage? its not the long term, its NOW...per GB blu ray is cheaper than HD-DUD.

HA, i knew it would all eventually boil down to "but hd-dvd is cheaper"

there is a reason macs are expensive, they are better....there is a reason blu-ray players are more expensive,they are better

not to mention when you are sitting in the driver seat you don't need to make desperation price cuts

EDIT: I guess I was late to the party. All my points have been addressed.

edit: edit: me and steve are on the same page

there ya go, steve jobs himself has weighed in and he knows the future is blu.

 

[hjelmn]

Why is the argument over hd dvd and bd? So Apple includes BD support in FCP. If they don't have displays that support HDCP (external) or PVP (protected video path) then it is all a moot point as you wont get full rez anyways. Do we as Mac users want a Vista-slow machine?

I totally agree.

I find it strange that the macbook pro apparently already has an HDCP compliant screen and video card but the high end 30" display still doesn't support HDCP. Maybe Apple will also announce HDCP compliant studio displays?

 

[mdriftmeyer]

I have a 933 Mhz Quicksilver G4 that is on it's last legs. I have about $4000 saved up burning a hole in my pocket and it's going to go towards a new Mac Pro (as soon as they upgrade). I think the performance gap is starting to get smaller between the Mac Pro and iMac, but I like the expandability of a tower vs. an all-in-one solution.

The fact that my Quicksilver is still kicking with 1TB of HD space, running Leopard, wireless N (thanks to Quickertek), while connected to a huge beautiful Apple monitor (thanks to a graphics card update) is reason enough to go with the Mac Pro when the time is right.

The problem with the iMac is no expandability. Try swapping out a hard drive in an old iMac. It's like breaking into Fort Knox. You can't add any pci cards when your USB 1.1 (or name any other port) goes out of date. Maybe the new iMacs are a bit easier to deal with. The biggest problem I could imagine is going without a computer for 2 weeks while Apple replaces the screen in my iMac.

Maybe I'm way off here... I should probably take a hard look at the new iMacs.

The gap will expand greatly when EFI standard cards from nVidia and AMD/ATi are released first half of 2008.

The wait has been on Microsoft and SP1 for Vista which now has EFI throughout.

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20071208/vista-sp1-changelog/

Hardware Ecosystem Support and Enhancements

• Adds support for new UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) industry standard PC firmware for 64-bit systems with functional parity with legacy BIOS firmware, which allows Windows Vista SP1 to install to GPT format disks, boot and resume from hibernate using UEFI firmware.
• Adds support for x64 EFI network boot.
• Adds support for the 64-bit version of MSDASQL, which acts as a “bridge” from OLEDB to a variety of ODBC drivers thus simplifying application migration from 32-bit platforms to 64-bit Windows Vista.
• Adds support for Direct3D® 10.1, an update to Direct3D 10 that extends the API to support new hardware features, enabling 3D application and game developers to make more complete and efficient use of the upcoming generations of graphics hardware.
• Adds support for exFAT, a new file system supporting larger overall capacity and larger files, which will be used in Flash memory storage and consumer devices.
• Adds support for SD Advanced DMA (ADMA) on compliant SD standard host controllers. This new transfer mechanism, which is expected to be supported in SD controllers soon, will improve transfer performance and decrease CPU utilization.
• Adds support for creating a single DVD media that boots on PCs with either BIOS or EFI.
• Enhances support for high density drives by adding new icons and labels that will identify HD-DVD and Blu-ray Drives as high density drives.
• Adds support to enable new types of Windows Media Center Extenders, such as digital televisions and networked DVD players, to connect to Windows Media Center PCs.
• Enhances the MPEG-2 decoder to support content protection across a user accessible bus on Media Center systems configured with Digital Cable Tuner hardware. This also effectively enables higher levels of hardware decoder acceleration for commercial DVD playback on some hardware.
• Enhances Netproj.exe to temporarily resize the desktop to accommodate custom projector resolutions when connecting to Windows Network Projectors.

The Video Card manufacturers have been forced to wait on Microsoft before moving forward, across the board, with UEFI.

This is the year Apple's Mac Pro line will finally be able to see dual and quad GPU offerings with OpenGL 2.1 optimized performance and something many engineering fields, applied physics, gaming and more can finally justify using a Mac Pro to model non-linear dynamic systems with solid performance.

 

[overcast]

and cost is a technical advantage? its not the long term, its NOW...per GB blu ray is cheaper than HD-DUD.

HA, i knew it would all eventually boil down to "but hd-dvd is cheaper"

there is a reason macs are expensive, they are better....there is a reason blu-ray players are more expensive,they are better

not to mention when you are sitting in the driver seat you don't need to make desperation price cuts



edit: edit: me and steve are on the same page

there ya go, steve jobs himself has weighed in and he knows the future is blu.

For the last time, I am not arguing the validity of more storage space in computing. But it is not an argument in entertainment. "Better" is totally subjective. I think FreeBSD is "better" for my development needs and it's free and runs on old hardware I have laying around.

 

[zetsurin]

Ever heard of Lossless compression before?

Yes, I use FLAC myself thanks. However I am not buying the less is more argument. 50GB > 30GB, end of story. Both formats can use (and now pretty much both do use) efficient codecs. I'll take the 50GB format, which is incidentally the one with the far greater sales.

And for those arguing for the format that is priced cheaper, what the hell are you doing with a Mac anyway? A commodity Windows PC will always be cheaper.