[Macworld]

Post your comments for Sony talks with Apple, MS about Blu-ray here

[jamus]

Isn't Apple a member of the blu-ray group? I would have thought it a natural shoe in to get blu-ray in a Mac.

[bondtrails]

NM

[bondtrails]

I pondered about this as well. I think Apple wants to stay away
from HD playback devices because it would go against their AppleTV
franchise. So, if Apple starts shipping Macs with BlueRay, it would
only be a (short) matter of time before someone makes copy software and
allows people to rip HD movies (to 720p) for viewing on AppleTV. This
would take away from the rental business.

--Bondster

[moose_n_squirrel]

Can someone clarify the role of the monitor in all this. If someone were to drop a Blu-Ray drive into their Mac, could it play movies? I keep reading that an HDCP-compliant monitor is required, and of course Apple's obsolete Cinema Displays are completely non-compliant. I also thought I read that Blu-Ray drives currently available for Macs can only be used as data drives, not to view movies.

Does this mean that there is a whole lot more to Blu-Ray than having the drive. Does Apple need to revamp both the OS and its monitors before Blu-Ray movies can be played?

[DanielMD]

The issue with Apple is firstly, no body including Sony has a configuration that works, fits or is economically justified.

Although Apple is a founding member, The Blu-ray Association, the group controlling the standard, has yet to license it to Chinese manufacturers. As such, it is not expected that the prices will drop to something that most users would expect.

Currently the price of a super Blu-ray is well above $500. Considering that there is only about 600 commercial movies available, it is something that many would jump on.

This is somewhat like the chicken and the egg. Until there is both, nothing gets laid.

[Peter Cohen]

moose

Can someone clarify the role of the monitor in all this. If someone were to drop a Blu-Ray drive into their Mac, could it play movies? I keep reading that an HDCP-compliant monitor is required, and of course Apple's obsolete Cinema Displays are completely non-compliant. I also thought I read that Blu-Ray drives currently available for Macs can only be used as data drives, not to view movies.

Does this mean that there is a whole lot more to Blu-Ray than having the drive. Does Apple need to revamp both the OS and its monitors before Blu-Ray movies can be played?

You're confusing a few things here. You can't use a Cinema Display to view output from a Blu-ray Disc player that has an HDMI output, because Cinema Displays aren't HDCP-compliant, that much is true.

It's also true that the Blu-ray Disc drives you'd buy for the Mac today aren't capable of showing video on your Mac.

But the two facts are mutually exclusive. Watching Blu-ray video through a Mac doesn't have much, if anything, to do with the display -- it's just that there's no operating system-level support for Blu-ray at this point. Once that comes, it's likely that we'll be able to burn Blu-ray Discs from the Finder just as we can with DVD-Rs, and watch movies just as we can with DVD movies.

So the bottom line is that if you bought a third-party Blu-ray Disc burner for your Mac tomorrow, you can't use it to watch movies; you can only use it to burn movies (using Roxio's Toast 9 Titanium software, look for details shortly) or to burn data.

[lwdesign]

If and when Blu-ray comes to the Mac, does anyone know if it will be a fully functional replacement for the Superdrives we have now? To be fully functional I mean it would have to:
1) Play CDs, DVDs, DVD movies, CD & DVD-based games, and Blu-ray titles (whether games, movies or data)
2) Burn to all of the above formats
3) Be able to work with re-writable versions of the above formats
4) Be as speedy or faster with legacy operations for CDs, DVDs and re-writables.
If so, it will be a Supersuperdrive. For me to want it in my computer, it would have to do all the above--and for a reasonable price not too far above the Superdrive I have now.

[gashworth9]

Yes it could and would be a functional replacement of the Superdrives of today. Also a previous comment was mistaken about the OS level support for Blu-Ray. You can at this moment currently burn Blu-Ray discs in the finder, or for that matter as a data-disc through iTunes. The drives that are currently available are natively recognized and work fine. The problem comes with video playback as Apple's DVD Play does not have playback support for Blu-Ray. I have a drive currently being sold by FastMac in my MacPro. It reads and write Blu-Ray (including Dual Layer Blu-Ray) discs with no problem - although reading a movie disc just reveals the files that run a Blu-Ray movie as DVD Player doesn't support Blu-Ray. It also is DVD-RW DL as well as CD-RW.

Refer to the following website for speeds and other stats on this drive. (http://store.fastmac.com/productinfo.php?cPath=10252&productsid=337)

PLEASE NOTE: This drive must be plugged in using SATA and therefore does not plug right into the drive bay in the MacPro. It must instead have a SATA cable routed down to one of the two extra SATA ports on the MacPro motherboard (originally added for the exact purpose, just not utilized) these are located to left of the PCI Express slots slightly behind the fan housing. The bottom of the two extra SATA ports is set up for the lower drive and the top for the top drive. If plugged into the bottom one it will open with the Option+Eject key sequence that is built to open up the lower superdrive. AKA: the MacPro is all set up for Blu-Ray support, just not utilized yet.

[Imaginos1892]

The problem with supporting Blu-Ray HD video playback on the Mac is not technical, it's political. The MPAA wants all HD content to be encrypted and locked all the way from the disk to the monitor face. If any part of the playback system does not support THEIR DRM THEIR WAY, it either degrades to less-than-DVD resolution or refuses to play at all. They have demanded that the very hardware, down to the PCB, be designed to their satisfaction so that nobody could, for example, connect a logic analyzer to the decoded video data. Apple has chosen not to implement an odious and intrusive DRM scheme that will change, and change, and change again as the studios try, and fail, to cope with the people who will crack each new version within days. The suits at MPAA need to be beaten vigorously with a twelve-pound clue hammer until they get it -- the very idea of DRM is fatally flawed. They HAVE to provide the key to the customer; therefore crackers can get access to the key. With the key, the encrypted data, and enough computer power it WILL be cracked.
--------------------
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!!

[airhead]

That may make sense, but it goes against their line of content creation apps all together. DVD SP, iMovie HD, Final Cut Studio is HD. I think it's more in their interest to move towards adding a Blu Ray superdrive drive than it is to be against it. They will lose all their content creators to adobe; who I think already has superior HD options in their applications.

[dchagwood]

My guess is that Apple needs to work out a slot-loading superdrive before putting these in to their computers. It's not like they magically appear out of nowhere. These things have to go through development, testing, and getting all the kinks worked out before they are released. Apple isn't a company that allows too many problems to pass unlike certain other muli-billion dollar companies. (M$) What??? What do you mean? I didn't say Microsoft. oops....Anyway I'm sure Apple has somthing great brewing for us.

[Machound]

I may be in the minority here, but I hope Apple never caves into soiling Mac OS X with HDCP. If they need to add Blu-ray play to meet customers demands, I hope that's done via a direct HDMI video link from the drive to the screen -- bypassing the OS altogether. What I'm suggesting is a clunky work-around similar to what early DVD playing Macs offered. A better (but apparently unacceptable solution) would be to add Blu-ray to AppleTV, thus keeping all the HDMI excrement out of our favorite OS.
I hate to see Apple follow Microsoft's lead into DRM prostitution. It's a one-way trip to the gutter. I think Apple realizes this. I just hope Apple's customers don't punish them for having real "vision" about the downsides of HDCP.
Friends, be careful what you ask for.

[jamus]

Toast 8 supports Blu-ray data reads, but I don't know about a Blu-ray movie.