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Wii U Faster Than 360 Or PS3, No Blu-ray Or DVD Support
jdkramar was one of several readers to write with news of the Wii U hardware information that's been trickling out since E3. The new console will run a multicore IBM processor based on 45nm architecture (technology currently underpinning Watson), and will have an AMD R700 GPU chipset found in the Radeon 4000 line of video cards. Apparently it will, in fact, run Crysis. Nintendo has confirmed that the Wii U will use a proprietary 25GB disc format, and won't support DVD or Blu-ray playback. A spokesman said, "The reason for that is that we feel that enough people already have devices that are capable of playing DVDs and Blu-ray, such that it didn't warrant the cost involved to build that functionality into the Wii U console because of the patents related to those technologies."
So... you don't think economies of scale would make blu-ray players cheaper than building a whole new disk player and new disk pressing plants to go with it...?
No sig today...
It doesn't say the drive doesn't use DVD or BluRay technology.
It says the machine won't do DVD or BluRay movie playback.
At 25 GB per disc, it's probably a single-layer BluRay disc. They're just not paying the license fees for the software to play back BR movies.
My understanding is that DVD player and BR player license fees are roughly ten bucks each, so if your console plays DVDs and BRs, it costs $20 per unit more to ship.
I have 10+ devices that could play a DVD and several that can play Blu-Ray. I didn't "intentionally" buy any of them with that express intent. If it *actually* lowers the price on the thing, I am all for this. I do not have the desire to pay for functionality which I do not need.
And yet PC gamers still end up with shitty half-assed console ports.
The Wii could read DVDs from the beginning. The SDK even had DVD functions and the graphics chip has the requisite Macrovision crap to legally enable DVD playback. The system firmware has a flag for enabling DVD mode. They could've released a "DVD Channel" on the WiiWare store to enable DVD playback. If they didn't, it was a business decision, not a technical one.
Newer Wii hardware nixed DVD playback because it was being used to pirate games (if you can read DVDs, you can read DVD-Rs; if you can read DVD-Rs, you can patch system firmware to make games transparently read DVD-Rs as if they were originals).
Why would you think that? The Wii is the only console of the current generation not able to play movies without hacking, yet it's also the best selling one. Clearly people buy these devices because of their gaming capabilities, not because of their other functions.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.