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

Not really a "Blu-Ray" issue

[TripMaster Monkey]

Before we start bitching about Blu-Ray, it's worthwhile to note that HD-DVD has (had, anyway) similar power requirements. From an Engadget article (emphasis mine):

For all the back and forth "we're better than you" rhetoric exchanged between the parties, the two really aren't that different. Both offer the same array of codecs and are driven by very similar power requirements. Essentially (and without intending any slight towards the HD DVD camp), anything an HD DVD player can do, a Blu-ray can do also.

Re:Is it the CPU power needed for the DRM?

[jonnythan]

No, the DRM has little to nothing to do with it.

Decoding 20+ Mbps of MPEG-2 or VC-1 video along with lossless, compressed audio on the fly is extremely taxing and uses a lot of power.

Re:Is it the CPU power needed for the DRM?

[Xest]

I'd be surprised if BD+ comes completely free in terms of additional processing load. But even the AACS layer has to be costly.

I'm not sure how the interactivity features compare in terms of additional processor loads, but this could cause differences between the formats also.

Whilst I understand the power required to render HD content I think we must also bear in mind we're looking at 20gb - 30gb of data that needs to be decrypted, that can't be easy on the hardware either surely?

I don't know if there's anything fancy they can do to lower the load, but even if there is dedicated hardware in the drive to offload this from the processor the dedicated hardware is still going to need some power.

It'd be nice to see what proportion of resources are required for AACS, BD+, Java for Bluray discs and the data decoding and rendering itself. Anyone any ideas on this?

Re:Is it the CPU power needed for the DRM?

[ChoppedBroccoli]

Well certainly having hardware assisted decode with the new Intel chipsets will be a great improvement.

From a recent anandtech review (http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3246&p=2):
"The Mobile GM45/47 chipsets are an integral part of Montevina and will feature the new GMA X4500HD graphics core. The X4500HD will add full hardware H.264 decode acceleration, so Apple could begin shipping MacBook Pros with Blu-ray drives after the Montevina upgrade without them being a futile addition. With full hardware H.264 decode acceleration your CPU would be somewhere in the 0 - 10% range of utilization while watching a high definition movie, allowing you to watch a 1080p movie while on battery power . The new graphics core will also add integrated HDMI and DisplayPort support."

However, there is going to have to be some sacrifice on the user experience. I mean you can't really expect to watch 30-40gb of data in 2 hours and expect battery life not to take a hit. What would be ideal is if a single blu-ray discs had both an H.264 and a lower quality MPEG-2/mpeg-4 version of the video. If I am watching on a laptop screen (hooking the laptop to a HDTV would be another story), I don't really need to see 1080p resolution.