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Just wading into the fray over HDD vs BR vs tape. As I see it, with per GB savings at 50% and steadily rising, it makes more sense to use HDDs and double them for redundancy. I edit video, so my storage needs are massive. BR for data storage has been too slow out of the gate to capture the market--it's still too expensive and not ubiquitous. Also, let's face it, 50GB is next year's Zip Drive. It's just not sufficiently robust, (size, speed, price) to be a serious player in the storage market. Even though it appears to be the future of video distribution, I doubt that we'll be using plastic disks at all in five years, thank goodness.

I disagree. Blu-ray is intended as a format for consumption of HD video, first of all. Its data use is a secondary (though welcome) consideration. Second, TDK & co. have already boosted Blu-ray discs to 200 GB. And as mentioned, shipping out a bunch of HDDs to 20-30 people is a lousy way to move footage to them. And, as it has been mentioned several times, BDs have been adopted at a rate that far outstrips how long it took DVDs to get a foot in the door. Speaking as an editor myself, I think it would be more convenient to back a whole (SD) completed project up to a single BD-R and leave it at that than it would be to have a rack of HDDs in the back of my limited space to poke through every time I need something. Once the drive is paid for, the cost of discs isn't that much. After all, miniDV tapes run $2.50 per for 13.6 GB of storage. You're up to $7.50 for tapes rated for HDV. BD seems increasingly reasonable in the face of these costs and it's dropping consistently.
 
Snow Leopard will support Blu-ray films

Nope, there is ZERO evidence of that. Everyone thought Leopard would finally support BR, everyone thought 10.5.1 would finally support BR, everyone thought 10.5.2 would finally support BR, everyone thought 10.5.3 would finally support BR and everyone thought 10.5.4 would finally support BR. Guess what? At this rate, its not likely going to happen. Apple dropped the ball big time on that and they aren't eager to bend over and pick it up.
 
Nope, there is ZERO evidence of that. Everyone thought Leopard would finally support BR, everyone thought 10.5.1 would finally support BR, everyone thought 10.5.2 would finally support BR, everyone thought 10.5.3 would finally support BR and everyone thought 10.5.4 would finally support BR. Guess what? At this rate, its not likely going to happen. Apple dropped the ball big time on that and they aren't eager to bend over and pick it up.

Seeing as Apple has connections with Blu-ray (people on the board of directors) I am sure they will bring it out sometime, and they cant just refuse to offer it forever, could they? Not when Vista supports it and I can buy a laptop with Blu-ray for £100 less then a entry-level MacBook from PC World.
 
I know movie playback isn't supported, but I couldn't care less about Blu Ray movies at this point. I'm interested in 50G backups. So you're saying that if I were to install a Blu Ray drive today with 10.5.5 I would totally be able to burn a Blu Ray data disk with OSX and/or Toast w/o a problem?
 
Seeing as Apple has connections with Blu-ray (people on the board of directors) I am sure they will bring it out sometime, and they cant just refuse to offer it forever, could they?

Apple's been on the Blu-ray board since its inception. Heck, I think that I remember them being on the board back when it was called Blue-ray (they had to drop the "e" because you can't copyright a color, apparently...)

And yes, they can refuse to offer it. They don't care about Blu-ray movies because Apple doesn't like DRM. HDCP is the worst incarnation thereof yet.
 
I know movie playback isn't supported, but I couldn't care less about Blu Ray movies at this point. I'm interested in 50G backups. So you're saying that if I were to install a Blu Ray drive today with 10.5.5 I would totally be able to burn a Blu Ray data disk with OSX and/or Toast w/o a problem?
Yes. :)
Toast has a Blu-ray add-on component for burning BD-R data.
 
Apple's been on the Blu-ray board since its inception. Heck, I think that I remember them being on the board back when it was called Blue-ray (they had to drop the "e" because you can't copyright a color, apparently...)

And yes, they can refuse to offer it. They don't care about Blu-ray movies because Apple doesn't like DRM. HDCP is the worst incarnation thereof yet.

They would loose a lot of business for essentially no reason.

Its like Apple not offering speakers or DVD reader drives on any of their computers... It will become a bear minimum standard.
 
They would loose a lot of business for essentially no reason.

Well, it's a little more complicated than that...

If Apple were to all of sudden embrace HDCP compliance in say, Snow Leopard, this would force current Mac Pro owners to buy new video cards and possibly new displays (some 3rd-party monitors are already HDCP compliant but ACDs are not). Everyone else (Mac Mini, iMac, Macbooks) would need to buy entirely new machines just to watch a stinking Blu-ray movie. An owner of a 1-year old iMac certainly wouldn't be happy about that. So that could even NEGATIVELY affect future sales.

Steve Jobs' denial about something he can't really change (DRM) has caused Apple to lose their window of opportunity (i.e. minimizing consumer uproar) with this over a year ago. Now, it's too late. Apple isn't HDCP compliant yet with no signs of changing, as everyone else has been for a while now.

Its like Apple not offering speakers or DVD reader drives on any of their computers... It will become a bear minimum standard.

I can care less about the cheap speakers that get packaged with most off the shelf PCs. But I'm a little confused with your DVD reader comment. Just about every Mac shipped within the last few years had DVD read support.
 
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