Sigh, I suppose there's no way to make you happy other than to get a time machine and leave my players untouched.
What a melodramatic way to miss the point.
I've never had a player reject a disk because of DRM.
Qualifier noted: so what were some of your disks rejected due to?
FWIW, I've had disks rejected due to hardware failures...sure, stuff breaks. It becomes less clearcut if a messed-up firmware updates was attributable.
So where exactly does this issue come up? Did it ever happen at all or is it all in your imagination, or are you just listening to unsubstantiated FUD? Or are you in the habit of trying to play pirated discs?
First, you claim that I don't have a BD player...then you claim that I play pirated BD disks. Proof of either is absent, which makes this a TOS reportable personal attack...I offer you this opportunity for you to withdraw your unsubstantiated accusations and apologize.
Perhaps you missed my
link to the Oppo players that still play them. If you want to have it, you can get it. Chain unbroken.
The requirement to use a niche product merely illustrates that the mainstream players have utterly abandoned these two old formats. Pragmatically, people would say that the chain is broken, but since you're choosing to go the pedantic approach, you "win" on these two specific formats, but it also means that we need to be pedantically complete and determine what other potentially orphaned formats out there. And the answer is that there indeed are more:
I'd like to hear more about them because I can't think of a time I've gone to play a CD and I had "the wrong type of player".
As you were warned, it has been roughly 20 years. But I do recall that the software was
Adaptec Toast. Do keep in mind that there was a learning curve in getting it all "Right" in the very early days of CD burning, because with CD-Rs then costing over $10 each, making such an error was literally costly...which is why I happened to recall this, despite it being nearly two decades ago.
There were CD-Rs, music CD-Rs (which had no distinction other than having a built in royalty to the RIAA on the assumption you were going to pirate with them), and CD-RWs...
There was far more than just "CD-R" vs "CD-RW" to consider, because there was also the formatting specifics burned onto said media's sectors. Nomenclatures of Red Book, Blue Book, Green Book and so on...do they ring any bells for you, or were you late to the Party?
It matter not, since at least the
Manual for Toast 3.5 specifically mentions: Mac Volume (HFS), ISO-9660, Audio CD, CD-i (Phillip's Compact Disk Interactive), Enhanced Music CD, Multitrack CD-ROM XA, plus hybrids and mixed modes, and other known names.
FWIW, I can also recall there existed Kodak's Photo CD format...and do note that this is not the same format as today's Kodak Picture CD is.
Plus there was also the short-lived "VinylDisc" CD format...yes, a literal digital/analog hybrid. And since you've rejected the pragmatic road for the pedantic, that there were probably less than 10,000 VinylDiscs ever printed is utterly irrelevant: it existed.
So! I'm so confident that your chain is indeed broken that I'll back it up with an IRL bet of a full dinner at the Chester Publick House that even your niche Oppo player doesn't support all of the above mentioned CD-based formats too.
Most college students are also sheep looking to fit in...
Hence how there's many other factors to consider, instead of trying to make this all simplify down to a "Single Issue" politic.
We all know where the college students will be getting their HD movies, and it isn't from iTunes or Netflix. It will be torrents of Blu-Ray rips made by people with Blu-Ray drives and Windows PCs.
No disagreement....but do keep that thought in mind.
I wonder how all those new film students are going to distribute the HD movies they make on their Macs.
Probably not too much unlike how I'm already doing it today.
Ironically, the dorm room is probably the ideal example where the computer becomes a device that does everything -- not just schoolwork and surfing, but communication (skype/ichat et al), music and TV and movies. Ideal place for the 27" iMac to shine and play Blu-Rays.
Sure. Of course, the dilemma is that if these students are indeed the pirating thieves that you suggested previously, then the implications of this from the business perspective side of things is that they're not an as-profitable of a customer segment for Apple to pursue as a priority (at least for this specific reason).
In summary,
1. We know that there's nothing technically stopping Apple from adopting Blu-Ray...but Apple has still not adopted it.
2. We also know that some people desire having Blu-Ray capability on a Mac.
3. And that's about all that we really definitively know.
-hh
