first BD-drive won't play commercial BD-movies

[treatment]

CNET reports

First Blu-ray disc drive won’t play Blu-ray movies (http://www.cnet.com.au/desktops/dvdburners/0,39029405,40091720,00.htm)

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The first Blu-ray (BD) disc drive for desktop PCs is here, but be warned -- it won't play commercial BD movies.

Sony officially announced its BWU-100A product at its "Experience More 2006" event in Sydney yesterday, all the while acknowledging that there's significant room for improvement before the product is viable for integration into media centre PCs.

Vincent Bautista, Sony's product manager for data storage, told CNET.com.au that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format.

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[Chris Beveridge]

Yeah, the lack of an AACS final license agreement is slowing down developments in a number of areas. Considering PC security is considered high level importance, it's not surprising that it's basically just a storage device right now and not a movie playback device.

[Skywise]

Well the laptop with the integrated drive does play movies, right? Something doesn't sound quite right.

[stfram]

[ QUOTE ]
Skywise said:
Well the laptop with the integrated drive does play movies, right? Something doesn't sound quite right.


[/ QUOTE ]

Sure it makes sense. Sony built their BD laptop so that all the parts are in-spec: software, drive, and video card. It also costs a fortune...

For the standalone BD drives, none of that is available to consumers, so they're screwed. And even when it becomes available, the original drive probably won't meet the specs since it was built as a storage device only.

The BD storage drive is a giant, pink elephant.

It's idiocy like this that could damn both formats, even though the BD specs look great on paper, IMO.

[JeffDM]

I thought the first "bare" BluRay drive to market was a Pioneer, not a Sony. The second comment posted in the linked article confirms this very thing.

The HDCP thing isn't an issue yet, is it? I thought that all the major studios said they weren't going to release discs with ICT for a few years.

[Skywise]

I meant Chris's comments about the AACS license. Sony does have one for their laptop solution so I don't see why it would be a stopping block for a standalone drive. In other words it's actually Sony's choice to release it without AACS support.

The only thing most consumers won't have is the video card with HDCP, but that shouldn't be a problem as Jeff notes for titles that don't use ICT. So the real question is, why is Sony doing this?

[Skywise]

HDCP isn't, but AACS is - you'd still need to be able to decrypt the contents of the discs.

[ape2020]

This seem to both jive and conterdict some articles quen found:

[ QUOTE ]
quen said:
this review (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1981691,00.asp)
The review also links to this desktop system review (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1979393,00.asp); that one's got a better Blu-ray drive (2x write) but apparently the software just bluescreened every time they tried to play a movie! Ho hum.

--quen

[/ QUOTE ]

They were getting blue screen of death everytime they tried to play a commerical BR disk.

-chimp1010

[quenelf]

[ QUOTE ]
Chimp1010 said:
They were getting blue screen of death everytime they tried to play a commerical BR disk.


[/ QUOTE ]

That's just a bug, though, not a copy-protection limitation or whatever.

Looking at the article, I think it means two things:

1) Most people don't have HDCP graphics cards.

2) There's only one consumer Blu-ray playback program, it doesn't work properly (as noted in the review of that laptop), and they aren't including it with the drive. Probably it isn't available for sale to the public either yet (on account of not working).

If that's all it is, then there's no fundamental issue with the drive - you could buy an HDCP graphics card and, when one becomes available, a working Blu-ray movie player.

The other possibility is that the drive is missing some protection key or other (which seems weird if they managed to make the laptop one work), or if the copy protection is going to require Vista or accompanying evil DRM hardware or something, and Sony just hacked around it for their laptop specifically.

At $750 I think not many people are going to get it for playing movies anyhow - those desperate to be first on the block probably already got the Samsung player, and everyone else might as well wait for the PS3 seeing as it'll be cheaper.

--quen

[fractured78]

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JeffDM said:
I thought the first "bare" BluRay drive to market was a Pioneer, not a Sony. The second comment posted in the linked article confirms this very thing.


[/ QUOTE ]

The fourth post explains that this review was written for CNET Australia. In that country this was the first bare drive to make it to market.

[Fencedude]

[ QUOTE ]
stfram said:


The BD storage drive is a giant, pink elephant.



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Speak for yourself.

Screw movies, I want to be able to save 30 gigs (or whatver) on a single disc.

[houkoholic]

[ QUOTE ]
Fencedude said:
[ QUOTE ]
stfram said:


The BD storage drive is a giant, pink elephant.



[/ QUOTE ]

Speak for yourself.

Screw movies, I want to be able to save 30 gigs (or whatver) on a single disc.

[/ QUOTE ]

If that's the case, why even bother with BR? I say wait on holographic storage. /images/graemlins/tongue.gif

Either way none of these storage solutions will be be able to offer the right price/performance for a very long time, but if HS delivers as promised then it's already light-years ahead of either BR or HD-DVD on the storage front.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/08/04/Hitachi_Maxell_announce_holographic_storage/

[JeffDM]

[ QUOTE ]
houkoholic said:
If that's the case, why even bother with BR? I say wait on holographic storage. /images/graemlins/tongue.gif

Either way none of these storage solutions will be be able to offer the right price/performance for a very long time, but if HS delivers as promised then it's already light-years ahead of either BR or HD-DVD on the storage front.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/08/04/Hitachi_Maxell_announce_holographic_storage/

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The main reason I wanted BluRay was the larger storage potential, but I don't know if any removable media is suitable for consumer backup. I believed that BluRay would be better for backup than HD-DVD in the longer run. Now I'm willing to dissociate backup/data transporation format from movie format.

The holographic drives cost more than 15x what a bluray drive does, and the blanks will cost a lot more than a hard drive of the same capacity does now. Holographic storage has been "coming" for maybe two decades now, I do hope they get it right and affordable, but I'm skeptical on the affordable any time soon if it's taken this long. I'd just use external hard drives for backups.

[houkoholic]

[ QUOTE ]
JeffDM said:
The holographic drives cost more than 15x what a bluray drive does, and the blanks will cost a lot more than a hard drive of the same capacity does now. Holographic storage has been "coming" for maybe two decades now, I do hope they get it right and affordable, but I'm skeptical on the affordable any time soon if it's taken this long. I'd just use external hard drives for backups.

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To be fair, that 15x-cost-of-bluray-drive is an enterprise-level solution which writes to 300g disks, whereas the bluray burner is squarely a consumer product, so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

HS consumer level products haven't been annouced yet, but they are aiming for 75g disks to begin with, I'd assume that would be more affordable, to use the term loosely. /images/graemlins/tongue.gif

Either way, I won't be investing on any of these "storage solutions" until one day which I can be sure that I can burn a disk and be almost certain that I can take it to someone elses computer and slap it into a drive and have it read perfectly, if I can't do that then it's not a good bakcup solution in my book. So until then it's still CD/DVD for me.

[VonEtrigan]

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stfram said:

The BD storage drive is a giant, pink elephant.

[/ QUOTE ]

So, would that be a balanced white elephant?

/audio geek

[stfram]

[ QUOTE ]
Fencedude said:
[ QUOTE ]
stfram said:


The BD storage drive is a giant, pink elephant.



[/ QUOTE ]

Speak for yourself.

Screw movies, I want to be able to save 30 gigs (or whatver) on a single disc.


[/ QUOTE ]

Then build a cheap external usb hard drive.

Hell, for the price this drive costs you could almost get a networked attached storage system, with four 250gb drives (two striped, two mirrored) and have something more efficient and completely redundant. Iomega sells one for $800...

Now, when the price of media drops, and the price of the drives drop to under $200, then you've got something...

[JeffDM]

[ QUOTE ]
stfram said:
[ QUOTE ]
Fencedude said:
Speak for yourself.

Screw movies, I want to be able to save 30 gigs (or whatver) on a single disc.


[/ QUOTE ]

Then build a cheap external usb hard drive.

[/ QUOTE ]

Have you had experience with install-your-own-drive enclosures? Most of them are junk, chinsy enclosures, razor edges on the inside with flaky, unpredictable electronics. I have not tried the $80 and up enclosures yet, those might be good. I'm not giving up on them yet, but I call this a word of warning not to expect too much from them.

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Now, when the price of media drops, and the price of the drives drop to under $200, then you've got something...

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I'm pretty sure Fence is thinking into the future, a year or two from now rather than for right now. Right now, it's clearly not worth it now unless you are into HD media authoring, then it's probably your cheapest business expense other than utilities.

[stfram]

[ QUOTE ]
JeffDM said:
Have you had experience with install-your-own-drive enclosures? Most of them are junk, chinsy enclosures, razor edges on the inside with flaky, unpredictable electronics. I have not tried the $80 and up enclosures yet, those might be good. I'm not giving up on them yet, but I call this a word of warning not to expect too much from them.


[/ QUOTE ]

I have, actually. Got two of them, one a 60gb drive and the other an 80gb. Got the enclosures on sale at CompUSA (should have bought them from Newegg though...).

They're nearly two years old, and no issues whatsoever. However I also use them in a reasonable fashion: I power them off when I'm not using them.

I mainly assembled them for use if I have a HDD failure, for getting data off of a dying drive FAST.

My experience burning backup DVD's from a dying hdd was not fun, and that was even with relatively current backups. I then had another hdd failure after I got the externals, and the experience was much smoother. /images/graemlins/happy.gif