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HBKDinobot

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 25, 2006
20
1
I want to buy an iMac, but I'm really holding out until they get Blu-Ray Drives. Anyone heard any rumors on this or have any guesses? Thanks.
 
I want to buy an iMac, but I'm really holding out until they get Blu-Ray Drives. Anyone heard any rumors on this or have any guesses? Thanks.

I am guessing late next year or early 2010. Mac Pros got to get them first.
When will Mac Pros get them, that's anybody's guess.
Then the iMac will get Blu-ray after Mac Pro.
 
I don't think the Mac Pros may get them first. Well, perhaps a Blu-Ray writer first. The iMacs are a consumer machine so I would expect they could get a player before the Mac Pros. HD Downloads to be played on a Mac is not happening with iTunes so Blu-Ray technology will be able to fill that need. Besides, if HD downloads were possible, it would be that HD "Lite" at 480P / 720P instead of the good kind of HD at 1080P that people really want when they have the high resolution screens like the iMac 24'.

I am waiting for this last piece of technology to appear in the iMac before I purchase one. But if they wait until next year, I'll want 4 cores instead of only 2 to take full advantage of Snow Panther for Intel Macs only.
 
There isn't really anything to gain by having one of these drives in a computer for movie playback, especially in a laptop or in iMac. The screens are so small that from any sort of viewing distance the picture quality improvement over DVD is negligible at best.

You also have to look at the target market for the computers. A huge number of the people who buy iMac/MacBook really couldn't care less about picture quality because DVD is more than sufficient and the movies themselves are much more affordable on DVD.
 
Never, VERY slow take up and will be outdated quickly by downloads, ;)

********. Good luck downloading a 50GB blu-ray quality movie on a 4Mb internet connection.

Digital downloads are still years away, because the internet infrastructure needs to be upgraded badly to give everyone much higher speeds first.
 
really i just want them to add support for Bluray drives so i can just buy an lite on BD drive for $130 and put it in a 5.25" external enclosure. Adding HDCP support should do it. When they add HDCP support they will most likely also update cinema displays and perhaps add HD movie downloads to iTunes
 
I don't want it for the resolution

There isn't really anything to gain by having one of these drives in a computer for movie playback, especially in a laptop or in iMac. The screens are so small that from any sort of viewing distance the picture quality improvement over DVD is negligible at best.

I understand Blu-Ray movies aren't going to look much better on a laptop than DVD. They do, however, look much better on my HDTV then DVDs, so all my current and future purchases are going to be Blu-Ray. I also love using my laptop to watch DVDs while on the road, or on a plane or train. If there's no Blu-Ray in my laptop, I'll have to buy things twice, which I'm not planning to do.

I can't even "Handbrake" Blu-Ray files onto my laptop if there's no Mac with Blu-Ray. So it makes sense to offer Blu-Ray as an option at least, both on laptops on desktops. After all, what if I got an HD camcorder and wanted to send someone Hi-Def video? Downloading takes too long -- Blu-Ray burners would be nice (although I'll settle for a reader-only at this point).
 
I understand Blu-Ray movies aren't going to look much better on a laptop than DVD. They do, however, look much better on my HDTV then DVDs, so all my current and future purchases are going to be Blu-Ray. I also love using my laptop to watch DVDs while on the road, or on a plane or train. If there's no Blu-Ray in my laptop, I'll have to buy things twice, which I'm not planning to do.

I can't even "Handbrake" Blu-Ray files onto my laptop if there's no Mac with Blu-Ray. So it makes sense to offer Blu-Ray as an option at least, both on laptops on desktops. After all, what if I got an HD camcorder and wanted to send someone Hi-Def video? Downloading takes too long -- Blu-Ray burners would be nice (although I'll settle for a reader-only at this point).

Actually, HD content on MBP 17" looks great. Shows much more details than DVD quality videos. But if the movie is interesting, then you aren't really looking for the details.

Macs can play HD content, just not the disk formats in OS X. You can however, with the disks you own, boot into windows on a Mac, rip the video (with Blu-Ray drive), compress them so you have a collection on your HD that would work in OS X.
 
I can't even "Handbrake" Blu-Ray files onto my laptop if there's no Mac with Blu-Ray. So it makes sense to offer Blu-Ray as an option at least, both on laptops on desktops. After all, what if I got an HD camcorder and wanted to send someone Hi-Def video? Downloading takes too long -- Blu-Ray burners would be nice (although I'll settle for a reader-only at this point).

Well, two points here. First, the only methods out there for ripping Blu-ray or HD-DVD to a computer for either local playback, or conversion to another format (iPod, for example,) are either $50+ applications of sketchy legitimacy, or multi-multi-multi step procedures. All of which are Windows-only. (No, Handbrake doesn't yet do Blu-ray or HD-DVD. I wish it did.)

Second, for sending someone Hi-Def video? Toast can burn about 45 minutes of HD video onto a bone-standard DVD, and hour and a half on a dual-layer DVD. I do it all the time with my AVCHD home videos, and HD EyeTV recordings. They play back just fine on a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player (you pick which one you are targeting when you burn the disc.) The HD-DVD ones even play back just fine on a Mac using Leopard's built-in DVD Player software.
 
how much do you think a mac with blu-ray will be? A-LOT


i recomend getting a Alienware with Blu-ray and install osx

it will be about 2k but you will have one of the best computer in the world
Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Q6600
EVGA nForce 680i Chipset, 2x16e
Dual NVIDIA® GeForce 8800 GT
4GB DDR2 @800MHz
250GB 7,200RPM Hard Drive

OSX

http://www.alienware.com/products/desktop-computers.aspx
now these are waaayyy nicer then macs
 
how much do you think a mac with blu-ray will be? A-LOT


i recomend getting a Alienware with Blu-ray and install osx

it will be about 2k but you will have one of the best computer in the world
Intel® Core™ 2 Quad Q6600
EVGA nForce 680i Chipset, 2x16e
Dual NVIDIA® GeForce 8800 GT
4GB DDR2 @800MHz
250GB 7,200RPM Hard Drive

OSX

http://www.alienware.com/products/desktop-computers.aspx
now these are waaayyy nicer then macs

You could always get a third-party Blu-ray drive for a Mac Pro:
http://www.mcetech.com/blu-ray/ ;)
 
Second, for sending someone Hi-Def video? Toast can burn about 45 minutes of HD video onto a bone-standard DVD, and hour and a half on a dual-layer DVD. I do it all the time with my AVCHD home videos, and HD EyeTV recordings. They play back just fine on a Blu-ray or HD-DVD player (you pick which one you are targeting when you burn the disc.) The HD-DVD ones even play back just fine on a Mac using Leopard's built-in DVD Player software.

Remember, broadcast HD content is much, much, much lower quality than that of Blu Ray.
 
********. Good luck downloading a 50GB blu-ray quality movie on a 4Mb internet connection.

Digital downloads are still years away, because the internet infrastructure needs to be upgraded badly to give everyone much higher speeds first.

well, i dont know what country you are in. but if you are in the UK, the UK's internet and communication side of things is awful. Its one of the worst in Europe. The telephone lines are crap, most house still have crap wiring (thanks to the 70's build era). So in the UK you are able to get half decent speeds, i got on average a constant download rate of about 1.2mbps on a '16mb' line. but in other countries in europe, they are more equipped for high download speeds. france and germany have got some of the highest in europe, with providers providing upto 50mb connections. even though virgin media do 20mb in the UK, its all done through cable, or fibre optics and therefore a lot more expensive. i pay £10 for my connection, the virgin media one is at least twice that price.


and blu-ray i think will last quite a long time, considering philips are making 200gb discs. and considering that the PS3 and the 360(maybe) will use Blu-Ray for games, the discs arent going to go out of fashion any time soon.
 
********. Good luck downloading a 50GB blu-ray quality movie on a 4Mb internet connection.

Digital downloads are still years away, because the internet infrastructure needs to be upgraded badly to give everyone much higher speeds first.

lol. first of all, 720P HD movies are, give or take, 8GB and not 5 times as huge. 1080 is a few shades larger at around 12GB, but nowhere near a season of the office at 50GB. secondly, most digital download services have already incorporated an ingenious system, which i'll call it by describing it...play it while it downloads.

as for the future though, we can look forward to instant downloads... once the whole internet infrastructure gets upgraded.
 
well, i dont know what country you are in. but if you are in the UK, the UK's internet and communication side of things is awful. Its one of the worst in Europe. The telephone lines are crap, most house still have crap wiring (thanks to the 70's build era). So in the UK you are able to get half decent speeds, i got on average a constant download rate of about 1.2mbps on a '16mb' line. but in other countries in europe, they are more equipped for high download speeds. france and germany have got some of the highest in europe, with providers providing upto 50mb connections. even though virgin media do 20mb in the UK, its all done through cable, or fibre optics and therefore a lot more expensive. i pay £10 for my connection, the virgin media one is at least twice that price.


and blu-ray i think will last quite a long time, considering philips are making 200gb discs. and considering that the PS3 and the 360(maybe) will use Blu-Ray for games, the discs arent going to go out of fashion any time soon.

360 uses DVD's and so far, not a single PS3 game has yet to make use of a blu-ray disc. there's no need... DVD's have more then enough space for massive games like GTAIV.

And here's today's reason blu-ray won't be found in a mac anytime soon... up-converter DVD players.
 
lol. first of all, 720P HD movies are, give or take, 8GB and not 5 times as huge. 1080 is a few shades larger at around 12GB, but nowhere near a season of the office at 50GB.

There are a lot of variable that impact this, principally bit rate of the encode. For example, "Live Free or Die Hard" in 720HD with 5.1 AC3/AAC audio download for the Apple TV is 3.98 gb in size. Its total bit-rate is 4415 mbps, thus the smaller size. It looks very nice for 98% of the movie, but that other 2% has noticeable video issues. With Blu-Ray, the bit-rates are a lot higher (20K mps?) and with larger file size, thus a much nicer picture in that 2% of video.
 
360 uses DVD's and so far, not a single PS3 game has yet to make use of a blu-ray disc. there's no need... DVD's have more then enough space for massive games like GTAIV.

And here's today's reason blu-ray won't be found in a mac anytime soon... up-converter DVD players.

Just correcting you on the blu ray fact. Metal Gear Solid 4 (which I'm soo pumped to buy) if I'm not mistaken the creator of the game said Blu Ray wasn't even enough space but they still fit it so Blu Ray is being used to its full capacity. Source
 
Blue Ray??

If I were you, I would focus on performance 4 core duo 3.2 GHZ, hopefully with 8 GB ram, and minimum, 512 MB graphic card. 1TB HDD, HDMI output, better screen and so on. I would wish so we can all choose not to buy keyboard and mice. I have 4 of them just waist of money for apple and customer. Oh I forget, the Blue-ray thing.
:) Buy yourself External burner. they are already faster and compatible with HD dvd and Blue Ray discs + normal ones.

I agree with several guys from forum, that blueray will be outdated. Flash cards going on 50 to 256 GB, they all waiting to get some money from these 4GB ones. I just bought 16 GB super fast with USB ULTRA. just for 35 USD. How much is Blue ray disk?
 
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