First Blu-ray Drives Won't play Blu-ray Movies

aapold writes "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. 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." All this hullabaloo makes me want neither side to win. If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!

Comments

if companies from the past behaved

[yagu]

If companies from the past behaved as companies today:

• Transistor radio announced. Will not play radio transmissions other than those from owners' transmitters.
• Color TV! All Shows reproduced in realistic black and white (those are colors, aren't they?)
• 100,000 mile car tires! Guaranteed for 10,000 miles!
• 10-speed bicycles! (speeds are produced by owner pedaling at various cadences)
• Stereo Hi-Fi! Two channels of high-fidelity sound through one speaker!
• Windows! (opaque)
• Digital Cable! oh wait, never mind.

But hey, not all is lost, from the fine article:

Bautista is optimistic that both issues will be resolved "soon", and says that despite not being able to play commercial content, the drive is still useful as a "storage device"...

So the drive is "useful as a storage device". Cool! Now I can get rid of my 250GX2 SATA Raid and keep my data on something useful. Technology just doesn't get any better than this.

Note to providers of stuff: It doesn't matter why your machine can't do what it's even named after(!), it can't. Don't bring us your tired, your poor, ... the wretched refuse of your product lines until they do what they're supposed to do! What a Colossus boner.

Re:if companies from the past behaved

[muyuubyou]

Funny that you mention a couple of technologies that were pioneered by Sony back in the day.

Ibuka and Morita must be spinning in their graves. They could as well power the PS3 by installing dynamo generators in their graves.

How low has Sony fallen since they passed away?

Is it really worth it, anyway?

[mark0]

I'm looking at a Superbit copy of 5th Element on my Oppo OPDV971H upconverted to 1080i and it looks great. I'm sure Blu-ray would look better, but would it really look so much better that I'd be ready to toss my current DVDs and player for that difference? Especially considering all of the baggage that comes with it?

I'll wait for the price to come way way down and all of the DRM to be cracked... probably when the next format is announced.

Bittorrent has already won this war.

[plasmacutter]

All this hullabaloo makes me want neither side to win. If only I didn't desperately crave HD content on my TV!

go to torrentspy or any other large site and search "hr hdtv"..

blu-ray and hd-dvd are overhyped and already obsolete.

h.264 encoded matroska at 600 mb or so an hour can do the job of these overbloaded and DRM ridden things.

and what's with this.. they expect pc owners to accept the kind of draconian superuser control over their pcs which are specified in their AACS restrictions? Give me a break, it'll never happen.

Re:Next media should be defined by the community.

[plasmacutter]

yes, it's called matroska with h.264 video, aac audio, and srt subtitles ; )..

it's been the standard with anime groups for the past couple years.