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Blu-ray Coming Out On Top?
wh0pper writes "Some interesting information came out at at the latest Blu-ray Disc Association meeting at Twentieth Century Fox Studios. Apparently, 90 percent of the CE industry and seven movie studios now back Blu-ray Disc. And most of the IT industry (except Microsoft) also supports Blu-ray Disc. This has prompted Mr. Parsons, Senior VP of Advanced Products Development for Pioneer Electronics, to say "There's no format war looming because it's not Blu-ray vs. HD DVD. It's simply Blu-ray versus standard definition DVD... Currently, DVD has 50,000 titles presently available, and both formats will co-exist for several years to come with new BD players supporting both formats. BD players make the perfect complement to new HDTVs that are being purchased by consumers." Mr. Parsons then announced that the upcoming CES would be used to launch Blu-ray Disc."
Everything you ever wanted to know about Blue Ray... http://www.blu-ray.com/
I'm not fat, just big boned...
I thought it was just one technical reason: the capacity of the disc. That's really all there was to it, right?
The point HD-DVD had going for it was that the discs and players would have been cheaper to make.
Hands in my pocket
There's plenty of technical reasons to use blu-ray.
There is very invasive DRM measures in blu-ray that make divx look like it would make Richard Stallman proud. You need to get permission every time you play a disc, and your discs are permanently mated to your player. You can't play your disc at a friends house or in another room in your house, and if your player breaks, you lose your whole DVD collection.
The studios love it but the consumers will be totally screwed over by it.
This would require a mandatory, permanent Internet connection for your BD player and I doubt we'll see stuff like that in consumer electronics in the next 10 years.
and your discs are permanently mated to your player. You can't play your disc at a friends house or in another room in your house, and if your player breaks, you lose your whole DVD collection.
I assume you refer to Sony's patent for such a mechanism. That patent was issued in 1999. They didn't put it in the PS2, they didn't put it in the PSP, now a few months ago it resurfaced and suddenly everyone assumes they'll use it for the PS3. IMHO Sony's too afraid of losing to MS to try something harebrained like that
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
You are totally missing the point.
The point of Blu-Ray is High Definition. So your analog video and audio outputs are not going to get you HD. You are not going to plug your HDTV to your DVD player using analog if you want HiDef.
The purpose of the DRM in Blu Ray is to block you from ripping the decrypted, compressed bitsream. If all you can do with BluRay is capture the analog, then we can already do better with regular DVD, so it would be a huge success for BluRay DRMs.
And if you know about what kind of DRM they are talking about, you would realize that its not going to be simple to permanently hack, even a software implementation.
Even if you are able to get the uncompressed HD image by hijacking your display device, watermark detection will make sure that your BluRay player keys will be revoked and wont be able to play new content.
The design of BluRay's DRMs has really been though out, and covers a lot of scenarios. Off course the implementations will have problems, bugs and exploits, but what it really comes down to is how well BluRay will keep track of compromised players, and how bad they are willing to perform key revocation.
Each player is supposed to have an unique ID, but I can see it from here: some manufacturer (cheap chinese for example) will mess up and produce 1000s of player with the same ID. When one of this player his compromised, 1000s of players will stop working with new releases if the studios revoke this key. 1000s of people will complain.
In the best case the manufacturer (contractually at fault for producing clones) will change the players.
In the worst case there will be lawsuits flying around between Studios, BluRay authorities, OEM, silicon vendors and consumers.
The good thing for the Japanese: the barrier of entry for cheap Chinese and Taiwanese manufacturer will be high. There will be the need to put in place "secure" production lines , making sure that keys are not leaked and that no clone are produced. The huge liabilities that the OEM will face if they screw up will be enough to give Pioneer, Sony etc.. time to make a buck on BluRay.
The FCC isn't forcing broadcasters to transmit in HD only(yet). They're forcing them to transimit in digital only which is very different.
Just because the Blu-Ray spec allows discs to be DRM'ed out the ass doesn't mean that every disc released is going to use those features.
I doubt that the content industry has forgotten about the failure of DIVX already -- they lost money on that, right along with Circuit City, for every movie on DIVX disc that sold for $2 on clearance after the product bombed.
Expect the full set of restrictions to be enabled only for Oscar screeners and things of that nature.