Steve Jobs Suggests Blu-ray Not Coming to Mac Anytime Soon

[Barsoom]

Toast 11 Yah Right

So you're saying Toast 11 lets you watch commercial Blu-ray movies while booted into OSX? Why don't I believe you? I think you're probably savvy enough to post a video of you booting up OSX on your Mac, inserting a store-bought Blu-ray movie into whatever drive, and seeing it play on the same screen. If you can do that, I'll buy Toast 11.

I bought Toast 11 for the Blu-Ray support. Uh-huh. BTW, great program, love it and use it lots. Blu-Ray support... nah.

When I first flashed it up and checked for Blu-Ray support, it launched Safari and took me to a website where I could pay for an additional download (can't exactly remember how much but $59.95 sounds about right) that would give me BD support... For content creation ONLY! Nowhere on that site did it mention that you would be able to watch Blu-Rays, just create and burn them (to be watched on a commercial BD player).

Barsoom

 

[wonderspark]

I bought Toast 11 for the Blu-Ray support. Uh-huh. BTW, great program, love it and use it lots. Blu-Ray support... nah.

When I first flashed it up and checked for Blu-Ray support, it launched Safari and took me to a website where I could pay for an additional download (can't exactly remember how much but $59.95 sounds about right) that would give me BD support... For content creation ONLY! Nowhere on that site did it mention that you would be able to watch Blu-Rays, just create and burn them (to be watched on a commercial BD player).

Barsoom

That's what I thought. I already create and burn Blu-ray content with my Adobe goods, but for now, I'll keep doing the VLC/MakeMKV method.

 

[wonderspark]

I'll agree with you there, but BD-Rs as a permanent storage solution is unreliable since 1 scratch in the wrong place can ruin any disc. I have disc paranoia with my games, movies, and any data I have to burn on disc, especially if I have to mail it.

AND you have to buy the Blu-Ray Drive, at least for now. They're around $150. A 64gb SSD is$170. Kind of a toss up if you factor in drive cost, and the reusability of the SSD.

SSD prices should come down just like HDD prices have and do on a regular basis. Sending someone a feature film at full resolution and quality is great, but them being able to copy it off, and use the same storage to send you back something else without burning another disc is even better. reusable storage.

Yeah, if festivals asked for a drive, I'd do it. So far, all have asked for discs or HDCAM. It's just not the norm yet, and I live in the present, yo!

 

[MacNewsFix]

Not completely the case. Years ago, before Blu-Ray, I went to sea with a media case with 200 or so legal DVDs. If I wanted a movie, I just picked one. Currently several Mac users on board have not switched to HD just so they can continue to do the same. Another friend switched to a Windows laptop, so that he could do the same thing with his BD collection.

I would give up my rips in a second if OSX would support Blu-Ray and I think I can say that the majority of my now pirating shipmates would as well.

Barsoom

I won't doubt it. Ironic that I travel with a portion of my digitally ripped DVD movie collection for the extra convenience of requiring less space and more instant gratification, no? I'm kind of shock there are so many pirated Blu-Ray movies floating aboard your ship, as many regulars here argue that digitized copies of Blu-Ray movies are impractical due to their large file size (Not me! MKV, baby.).

I believe Apple will remain reluctant as long as the adoption of Blu-Ray on computers remains low. Last I checked a few months ago, the two largest manufacturers of optical drives in Taiwan claimed Blu-Ray drives only accounted for 1% of their orders.

Considering Blu-Ray seems more targeted at entertainment and the home theater crowd while mobile computing seems to be migrating to the cloud, laptops sans optical drives or tablets (still no software sold on Blu-Ray discs), there just seems to be little reason for motivation. Also, DVD sales still stand at 80% of physical media sold. Sadly, people such as yourself and those living in places where high-speed Internet is capped, prohibitively expensive, or otherwise inaccessible fall between the cracks as the marketplace decides whether Blu-Ray or digital delivery formats capture their hearts and minds.

Stay positive. If Blu-Ray continues to gain traction and the Blu-Ray licensing bodies continue to streamline things for computer manufacturers (supposedly much done on this front the last few months), Apple may offer the option.

Stay safe, and cheers!

Respectfully,
MacNewsFix

 

[Bishope1999]

seriously? discs as a storage media? LAME. Remember Zip drives? Yeah that worked out.

discs are too fragile a medium. Solid State Storage is the future of backup and data storage.

I personally disagree with that. My personal experience hasn't been all that good with storing my important data in a HDD. The HDD of my previous two DVR's crashed and I lost all the recorded data, I had no way of recovering it. Last year the Hard Drive of my PC crashed and I lost all the data I had in there. Luckily for me, I had the majority of my files stored in CD's and DVD's and I was able to recover most of my lost files, even from a few CD's that are almost 10 years old. Even at my job, we record directly into a PC and transfer the files into a HDD, but once someone bumped into the HDD drive and it fell, it was unusable and all that data was lost.

For those reasons I feel much more comfortable storing all important data into physical discs. The advantage of a Blu-ray disc is the scratch resistant coating so it's very unlikely to get scratched. I can comfortably author Blu-ray discs with footage I record with my HD Cam on SL or DL Blu-ray discs without worrying that the data will just disappear by any technical problem and without having to reduce the bitrate do to the limitations of a DVD to make a AVCHD disc. I can store the info into a HDD and treat that as a back up, but the disc storage is my most reliable source.

 

[scottsjack]

Finally BluRay

Last night I installed my new $84.99 LG BR burner from OWC in my 2010 MP. I then installed the included PowerDVD 8 software (PowerDVD 11 is current). Power DVD asked for an update which I installed.

Finally I popped the RB disc from my $9.95 Ronin BluRay/DVD combo pack in and wow, BR really works good on my 24in monitor under Windows 7. Tonight I'll work on the Mac side with MakeMKV to create a digital copy.

Sorry iTunes Store.

Next stop, "Battle: Los Angeles" BluRay for less than $20.00.

 

[AidenShaw]

for truly important data, burn "RAID-1" DVD/BD discs

For those reasons I feel much more comfortable storing all important data into physical discs. The advantage of a Blu-ray disc is the scratch resistant coating so it's very unlikely to get scratched. I can comfortably author Blu-ray discs with footage I record with my HD Cam on SL or DL Blu-ray discs without worrying that the data will just disappear by any technical problem and without having to reduce the bitrate do to the limitations of a DVD to make a AVCHD disc. I can store the info into a HDD and treat that as a back up, but the disc storage is my most reliable source.

Another trick for the truly paranoid, or for data that's truly priceless, is to make multiple copies of a DVD or BD disc. (Start by creating an ISO image of the disc, and burning multiple copies of the ISO image to high quality discs so that the discs are truly bit-for-bit identical.) Store the copies in different physical locations (one at home, one in your safety deposit box, one at the office or with a relative,...). (And, of course, do an MD5 checksum or similar check to verify that each disc starts out perfect.)

If the data is file data (directories and files), if a file fails to copy due to a disc error - just put one of the other discs in and copy that file. Disc errors due to degradation of the optical disc should be random, so if several sectors go bad on each of a handful of disks - it's extremely unlikely that any small (like camera RAW images, a few tens of MB or smaller) file will have errors on all of the discs.

If a simple file copy doesn't find a good copy of every file, then you can bring out the big guns and implement a kind of "RAID-1" (where there can be as many mirrors as you like) for the disc.

A tool named "ddrescue" is able to do this. It can be used to create a new .ISO file from the disc. "ddrescue" uses lower-level access to the disc which lets it perform more powerful error recovery techniques than the normal filesystem.

The key feature of "ddrescue" is that if a sector (not file, but individual sector) is unreadable even with aggressive error recovery, "ddrescue" will put garbage data into the .ISO file for that sector, and append to a log that records which sectors were successfully copied or not.

So when you're done, you have a mostly-correct .ISO file, and a logfile of which sectors are not correct.

The next step is to put in one of the other discs, and rerun "ddrescue" specifying the disc, the .ISO file, and the logfile of bad sectors. "ddrescue" will try each bad sector from the new disc, and if successful it will merge the correct data into the .ISO file and update the logfile to show that those sectors are now good.

You can repeat this with other copies until a correct .ISO is created. You can even copy the .ISO and logfile to other computers, and see if a different model of disc drive can read the disc.

Note that in the case of doing a file copy of a large file, you're depending on finding no bad sectors in any of the thousands or millions of sectors in the file on one of the discs. With "ddrescue", if a file has 3 bad sectors out of 1 million - you'll succeed as long as any copy of the disc has a correct copy of each of those 3 bad sectors.

(ps: 1 million sectors is a 2 GiB file on a DVD.)

(pps: If you wear tin-foil hats, you might also want to buy several different brands of BD/DVD discs. This will protect against having a bad batch of discs, where all the copies could go bad due to a manufacturing problem.)

 

[xbjllb]

Since you actually bought this, I'd love to hear how well it works. I might buy it too, if it's better than the method using VLC and MakeMKV.

It works great. It's a bit buggy and "half" crashes, but somehow continues and then plays the discs fine. All my commercial discs played but a Fotomagico slideshow converted to quicktime burned to Blu-ray lacked the audio while the audio played just fine on a regular blu-ray player. So perhaps audio has to be in the usual dolby format.

And what's the CPU utilization - does it use hardware-assisted video decode on every Apple with suitable decoder hardware?

I don't understand enough to tell you. I didn't notice any signs of significant cpu use.

Ok. Just checked again. My other personal project self-burned which had dolby audio DID play just fine. What a rush to finally see it on the Mac.

And CPU usage was 3.17% of user and 0.33 of system according to activity monitor. This on a 12-core 2.93.

Hope that answers your questions.

Oh. And when I fired it up this time, it didn't "half" crash.



P.S. I have better news. On a commercial disc, varies between 1.5-2.95% of user and 0.37-0.54% idle

No way to access menus yet as far as I can see; it crashes when quitting. No way to eject disc while using, must quit application.

But just being able to play 'em... wow.

 

[AidenShaw]

And CPU usage was 3.17% of user and 0.33 of system according to activity monitor. This on a 12-core 2.93.

Is a completely loaded OSX system 100% busy or 1200% busy?

If the latter, that's excellent and makes it likely that it's hardware-assisted. If the former, that's about 36% of a core - which would be reasonable for software decoding.

 

[xbjllb]

Steve jobs dead wrong about blu-ray not coming to mac anytime soon

Is a completely loaded OSX system 100% busy or 1200% busy?

If the latter, that's excellent and makes it likely that it's hardware-assisted. If the former, that's about 36% of a core - which would be reasonable for software decoding.

Not sure. However, I tried it on the other machine, an eight core. I have less fonts on that one, more of the interface showed up so there might be a way to access menus. However, the one home-burned Blu-ray with Dolby sound would just not play although it plays fine on my 12-core, instantly. It had no trouble with commercial discs though.

I think Mac does figure usage per core, so that would probably be 1200% busy on the 12 core. But I'm guessing, someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

So I guess we can just retitle this entire thread:

STEVE JOBS DEAD WRONG ABOUT BLU-RAY NOT COMING TO MAC ANYTIME SOON

As the man and company under his direction, purely for spite, rush to incorporate full Blu-ray support in LION.

 

[MacNewsFix]

In other news....

The BBC reports:

A new plastic surface which overcomes the difficulties associated with growing adult stem cells has been developed, according to scientists.

The new "nano-patterned" surface was created using a manufacturing process similar to that used to make Blu-ray discs.​

Sorry, but I'm going to wait for the Netflix version. I like my cells instantly.

-MacNewsFix

P.S. Always happy to see advances in medicine. I just couldn't resist.

 

[DisMyMac]

Next stop, "Battle: Los Angeles" BluRay for less than $20.00.

I think we're going to see the real thing either this year or next... Before Blu-ray comes to the Mac anyway.

 

[gkarris]

So I guess we can just retitle this entire thread:

STEVE JOBS DEAD WRONG ABOUT BLU-RAY NOT COMING TO MAC ANYTIME SOON

Well, I think the new Mac Mini says it all...

Mac*mini is designed without an optical disc drive. Because these days, you don’t need one. It’s easier than ever to download music and movies from the iTunes Store. And you can download apps from the Mac App Store with a click.

 

[InuNacho]

Yeah, it's never going to happen.

 

[toke lahti]

Well, I think the new Mac Mini says it all...

Sad, but true.
Yesterday 83% (pro, imac, mini, mbp, mb, mba) of macs had optical drive.
Today only 60% (mini lost it and mb gone).

 

[Sylonien]

The BBC reports:

A new plastic surface which overcomes the difficulties associated with growing adult stem cells has been developed, according to scientists.

The new "nano-patterned" surface was created using a manufacturing process similar to that used to make Blu-ray discs.​

Sorry, but I'm going to wait for the Netflix version. I like my cells instantly.

-MacNewsFix

P.S. Always happy to see advances in medicine. I just couldn't resist.

"instantly". Well my damn internet has been on and off recently. So I'll be completely cut off when it happens. That's why I don't like the idea of everything streaming / cloud-based.

 

[MacNewsFix]

"instantly". Well my damn internet has been on and off recently. So I'll be completely cut off when it happens. That's why I don't like the idea of everything streaming / cloud-based.

Sorry to hear it. Hope your ISP and/or steaming service of choice gets their stuff together soon.

I won't speak for you, but in my experience, for every instance of a streaming service having a hiccup, more rented DVDs jumped in the middle of a critical scene or were unplayable.

Where I live, I am down to one semi-convenient Blockbuster (priced higher than average due to its high rent location), Redbox (no selection) at McDonald's, or the library (one copy at most and mainly older films). Otherwise, I have to rely on mail order rentals.

Many people in this thread have argued that Apple should support Blu-Ray because they live in an area where high speed bandwidth is unavailable. Meanwhile, I live in a major metropolitan area that has had 100+ Mbps speeds for two years. Whether due to the advent of cheaper, faster broadband or just personal preference, the market here seems poised to weigh in on the side of streaming whether I like it or not.

The Twin Cities are not an anomaly. Forecasts indicate 100 million homes in the US could be using such speeds by 2015 (not that these speeds are necessary for streaming). Right now, 40 million US homes from just Comcast alone can take advantage of 100+ Mbps down.

I'd like to say the world's largest economy is leading the way, but no. In the UK, Fujitsu is bringing 1Gbps to 5 million homes. In Hong Kong, $26 will net you the same. Meanwhile, South Korea has pledged 1Gbps to all homes by 2012 and plans national 100Mbps WiFi. To put things in perspective, 1Gbps will allow you to download a 700MB movie in just 5.47 seconds, a 4.7GB DVD would finish in 37.6 seconds, and a 50GB Blu-ray disc would appear on your computer in 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Previously incomprehensible speeds are quickly becoming or already commonplace in some Scandinavia countries.

If you want to follow developments concerning high speed Internet in the US (including rural areas), I highly recommend checking out the following site. Any country that wishes to remain competitive best roll out easily accessible (ie affordable), ubiquitous high speed Internet sooner rather than later or get left behind. Two events this week, the capitulation of Borders Books (BOO!) and the successful deployment of Lion (YEAH!), just go to highlight the fact that "the future" is really the present, ready or not.

 

[lilo777]

Sorry to hear it. Hope your ISP and/or steaming service of choice gets their stuff together soon.

I won't speak for you, but in my experience, for every instance of a streaming service having a hiccup, more rented DVDs jumped in the middle of a critical scene or were unplayable.

Where I live, I am down to one semi-convenient Blockbuster (priced higher than average due to its high rent location), Redbox (no selection) at McDonald's, or the library (one copy at most and mainly older films). Otherwise, I have to rely on mail order rentals.

Many people in this thread have argued that Apple should support Blu-Ray because they live in an area where high speed bandwidth is unavailable. Meanwhile, I live in a major metropolitan area that has had 100+ Mbps speeds for two years. Whether due to the advent of cheaper, faster broadband or just personal preference, the market here seems poised to weigh in on the side of streaming whether I like it or not.

The Twin Cities are not an anomaly. Forecasts indicate 100 million homes in the US could be using such speeds by 2015 (not that these speeds are necessary for streaming). Right now, 40 million US homes from just Comcast alone can take advantage of 100+ Mbps down.

I'd like to say the world's largest economy is leading the way, but no. In the UK, Fujitsu is bringing 1Gbps to 5 million homes. In Hong Kong, $26 will net you the same. Meanwhile, South Korea has pledged 1Gbps to all homes by 2012 and plans national 100Mbps WiFi. To put things in perspective, 1Gbps will allow you to download a 700MB movie in just 5.47 seconds, a 4.7GB DVD would finish in 37.6 seconds, and a 50GB Blu-ray disc would appear on your computer in 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Previously incomprehensible speeds are quickly becoming or already commonplace in some Scandinavia countries.

If you want to follow developments concerning high speed Internet in the US (including rural areas), I highly recommend checking out the following site. Any country that wishes to remain competitive best roll out easily accessible (ie affordable), ubiquitous high speed Internet sooner rather than later or get left behind. Two events this week, the capitulation of Borders Books (BOO!) and the successful deployment of Lion (YEAH!), just go to highlight the fact that "the future" is really the present, ready or not.

Too many words. Still no idea for how to get anything approaching BluRay quality online. Do you really not watch movies on BluRay? You should try some day. Apple is good, good high quality hardware is better (and you can not get it from Apple).

 

[janstett]

Too many words. Still no idea for how to get anything approaching BluRay quality online. Do you really not watch movies on BluRay? You should try some day.

The quote posted from the new Mini's product page tells us all we need to know.

<zombie voice>
You don't need an optical drive. Download from iTunes. Take your soma.
</zombie voice>

I'm starting to think Apple should be investigated for antitrust -- didn't they scream bloody murder when Microsoft rammed IE down everybody's throats? Well now Apple is ramming iTunes down everybody's throats. Apple has a bigger market cap than MSFT, so have at it DOJ! Split iTunes into a separate company.

We knew this is where Apple is going so it's hard to say it's a surprise (although they do offer the external superdrive when you configure the Mini).

 

[xbjllb]

A little limerick

There once was a man named Steve
Who was so far in the future he'd heave
All the technology he had, for tech that was bad
Until finally they forced him to leave.

 

[James_C]

I do understand that a significant number of people do want Blu-Ray, and I understand why you do. However it is clear to me that not only are you unlikely to see a Blu-Ray drive as a standard option in the future, but Apple is going to start to phase out all (internal) optical drives at some point in the future. The bulk of Apple's Mac sales are its notebooks and Apple have already said that the Mac BookAir is the future of notebooks. Now with Apple dropping the MacBook and updating the Mini with no optical drive, they have already started that transition. Also looking at the new hardware, the EFI can now reinstall OS X from Apple's servers, together with the Mac App store, it is pretty clear that they are moving away from optical drives. Apple where the first computer company to drop the floppy drive and many people said they were crazy then.

 

[KnightWRX]

Optical drives have nothing to do with Blu-ray support. Apple just needs to implement AACS in the OS as they already support HDCP on the hardware for their iTunes crap. Then anyone would be free to write a Blu-ray player for OS X and charge for it.

Drives can be USB and 3rd party, Apple doesn't need to sell them.

What a hard concept. Blu-ray support at the OS level so that the market can sell a product for users that want it. Doesn't even require Apple to modify its secret hardware roadmap.

 

[linux2mac]

The quote posted from the new Mini's product page tells us all we need to know.

Yep, "as I've said before, disc is dead." (Erica Sadun - TUAW)

Mini vs Pro: consumer Macs grow up
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/07/20/mini-vs-pro-consumer-macs-grow-up/

 

[wonderspark]

Sorry to hear it. Hope your ISP and/or steaming service of choice gets their stuff together soon.

I won't speak for you, but in my experience, for every instance of a streaming service having a hiccup, more rented DVDs jumped in the middle of a critical scene or were unplayable.

Where I live, I am down to one semi-convenient Blockbuster (priced higher than average due to its high rent location), Redbox (no selection) at McDonald's, or the library (one copy at most and mainly older films). Otherwise, I have to rely on mail order rentals.

Many people in this thread have argued that Apple should support Blu-Ray because they live in an area where high speed bandwidth is unavailable. Meanwhile, I live in a major metropolitan area that has had 100+ Mbps speeds for two years. Whether due to the advent of cheaper, faster broadband or just personal preference, the market here seems poised to weigh in on the side of streaming whether I like it or not.

The Twin Cities are not an anomaly. Forecasts indicate 100 million homes in the US could be using such speeds by 2015 (not that these speeds are necessary for streaming). Right now, 40 million US homes from just Comcast alone can take advantage of 100+ Mbps down.

I'd like to say the world's largest economy is leading the way, but no. In the UK, Fujitsu is bringing 1Gbps to 5 million homes. In Hong Kong, $26 will net you the same. Meanwhile, South Korea has pledged 1Gbps to all homes by 2012 and plans national 100Mbps WiFi. To put things in perspective, 1Gbps will allow you to download a 700MB movie in just 5.47 seconds, a 4.7GB DVD would finish in 37.6 seconds, and a 50GB Blu-ray disc would appear on your computer in 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Previously incomprehensible speeds are quickly becoming or already commonplace in some Scandinavia countries.

If you want to follow developments concerning high speed Internet in the US (including rural areas), I highly recommend checking out the following site. Any country that wishes to remain competitive best roll out easily accessible (ie affordable), ubiquitous high speed Internet sooner rather than later or get left behind. Two events this week, the capitulation of Borders Books (BOO!) and the successful deployment of Lion (YEAH!), just go to highlight the fact that "the future" is really the present, ready or not.

I haven't rented all that many movies, but when I do, I find that washing it with soap and water before playing it removes all the boogers and whatever else people do with them. I once had a disc skip after that, and got a new one for free.

So for me, it's disc error: 1, 'net error:7, at least. That counts being at the homes of friends that were streaming a movie when it suddenly started buffering endlessly, as well. My own personal movies have never skipped.

I'm not saying streaming movies are seven times more likely to fail than discs, but then again I've never seen internet speeds that were greater than 30Mbps, ever. However, I love Colorado more than I love fast net speeds, my discs don't skip and they look/sound better than streaming, so it's all ok.

We've had some really heavy storms here, lately. Those can take out the power completely, unless you have an automatic generator hooked into your house. At that point, though, I'd rather watch the weather out the window anyway.

To those that say disc is dead, I say streaming is still a toddler prone to temper tantrums, whereas discs are more like zombies... walking undead.

 

[nate13]

When they phase out DVD to BR, there will be Blueray in Macs. There is no need to add complexity that the majority of users don't use!!!