wow, apple drops firewire on a few machines, which the rest of the computer world NEVER fully adopted and you all lost your minds. They refuse even OS level support of a popular and getting more popular format and you mock the OP?
While I agree that the OP may have been a bit dramatic in his rant to discredit his want/need for Bluray is pompous and judging by the replying posts, quite ignorant.
Aside from possibly the highest rung of FiOS there is no convenient way to download a video file that comes close to the quality of a bluray video. Even with FiOS (which is hardly anywhere at the moment) I imagine it would take hours, possibly as much as a day.
A full movie in on Bluray, with language support, subtitles, and lossless audio (we'll leave out the special features for now) clocks in around 23GB of data. Yeah, let's just download it! Now how many of those can we fit on a 2TB drive (assuming you have the dough to spend on a bunch of those for archiving your movie collection)? Around 45. That's JUST bluray quality videos. No OS, no photos, no project files, no other media.
Yeah, optical media is annoying, but until hard drive storage and internet speeds catch up there is no way in hell that bluray is dead. Sorry. And judging by the fact that we're still years behind even europe and Japan in adopting high speed tech, I'd say you got a decent wait on your hands.
I don't think Apple necessarily has to support it in every machine (such as the macbooks or even their laptops in general) but they should at least give use the option at the OS Level.
Those of you who say just rip it on a windows are hilarious. First of all, it takes me on average the amount of time it would take to watch the movie TWICE to break encryption, decode/rip, and then remux the correct audio and video tracks together. That's just to get the main feature and even then you've got about a 45% chance it's not going to work that easy and you have to use one of about 3-4 methods to somehow get everything syncing up right.
It's not like busting out DVD copy or handbrake and just ripping a DVD in 5 minutes.
Now that you have your stripped down 25GB file, where you gonna archive it too?
It's a PITA just for me to use the emerging video format and thats just jacked.
Whoever used the gamma argument, well, I'm just not even going to dignify that moronic statement with a breakdown. Seriously? Gamma?
If you care about your movie watching experience to the point of considering yourself an armchair videophile then there simply is no better consumer option at the moment than bluray.
The bitrate of a bluray movie at times approaches 55-65MBsec. There is so little visible compression that it's nearly not even there from even a distance of two feet on a 47" 1080p TV.
Saying optical media is dead is like saying mechanical harddrives are dead. Of course they are. EVENTUALLY. but sorry, it's only in your wet dreams that everything is moving over your utopian all-encompassing uber-network.
Bluray is not just about the pixel dimension of each frame, it's also about the compression and detail of the image. Just like a crappy 60% jpeg vs a high quality tiff.
I know it's stupid to say you'd leave your OS of choice because of it, so in that respect the OP was a little silly, yes, but to browbeat him (with ignorance, ironically) over calling out Apple on a feature that should be there at this point is wrong. Sorry.
