Blu-ray In Laptops Could Be Hard On Batteries

damienhunter notes a Wired story on the power-hungry ways of the first generation of Blu-ray players coming soon to a laptop near you. "With the Sony-backed HD format emerging victorious from a two-year showdown with Toshiba's HD DVD, many laptop manufacturers are now scrambling to add Blu-ray drives in their desktop and notebook lineups. Next month, Dell will even introduce a sub-$1,000 Blu-ray notebook... But the promise of viewing an increasing variety of HD movies on your laptop may be overshadowed by ongoing concerns over the technology's vampiric effect on battery life. Indeed, if the first generation of Blu-ray equipped laptops are any indication, you might not get more than halfway through that movie before running out of juice completely, analysts say."

Comments

There's a solution to this

[squiggleslash]

Blu-ray discs have optional support for "Managed copy". For those discs that enable it, there's nothing stopping the manufacturers from shipping a tool allowing the user to copy the disc to the laptop's hard drive in a form that's easier to play. The user can build a library of stored content while the laptop is plugged in, and then watch it when it's not. Supporting this feature would also beat carrying around discs everywhere. I can honestly say I've used my laptops to watch full DVDs four or five times in the entire time I've had the capability, it's just not as practical as it appears, and I hate taking discs on vacation with me that I might lose.

HD DVD made "managed copy" mandatory for discs with DRM, but, alas, it's Blu-ray that's the remaining widely supported HD disc format. (I'm not calling it the victor, it still has to beat downloads, and SD.)

Re:Problem solved..

[evilviper]

Just plug the power in, rip the movies to your hard disk, and take the disc out.

Except the main consumer of power is maxing out the CPU to do the highdef H.264 decoding in real time.

Last time I checked, you could get a pretty good HD quality movie down to about 8GB with Divx, without any real quality drop.

Words cannot adequately describe how idiotic that statement is... Divx is MPEG-4 ASP, much older and less advanced than H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is the primary codec used to encode highdef discs.

How in the world you're expecting to use an OLD codec to reencode a video stored in a NEW codec, to reduce the file-size of a video by a factor of 5, while NOT losing HUGE amounts of picture quality, is vastly beyond my comprehension.

Re:Problem solved..

[evilviper]

Some codecs are invented for the sole purpose of adding meta-info to a media file, adding DRM, or changing the way it can be streamed (or not) over a network.

I happen to be a professional, and I know of NO such codecs. Not one.

DRM, metadata, and streaming are completely and totally independent of the underlying video and audio codecs.

many people are very happy with the quality that can be achieved with XviD using a few gigs of data and can barely tell the difference between that and a H.264 uber NEW 25+MBps HD+++ codec.

Some people are very happy with vinyl records. Some people are legally blind. That does not change the facts.

I will ignore the rest of your purely trolling comment.

Re:Problem solved..

[pthor1231]

It's even worse that that, he can't even read the pages he links. From the matroska project front page (Emphasis mine):

First, it is essential to clarify exactly "What an Audio/Video container is", to avoid any misunderstandings:
* It is NOT a video or audio compression format (video codec)