Blu-Ray: Is It Time?

With the price and reliability of solid state media becoming better by the day, BluRay seems like an answer in search of a problem.

4GB and 8GB flash drives are becoming retarded cheap. Pretty soon, someone will have the idea to plop a movie on something like that with a dedicated player. Imagine a whole season of television programming on something the size of your thumb.

So, if downloads don’t catch on as quick as needed, solid state drive movies are the next media shift.

Blu-Ray? I think thats just a fad and that the future is laser-disc. With a name like that how can it not be futuristic?

I have been using the same drive you just bought for a few months now. I would give it 5/5 except that I have had issue with some scratches on rental disks. Since this is my only drive I cannot compare how good it is at reading over scratches, but it is a very nice drive otherwise.

Think they can fit any more branding on the front of that drive?

The only problem I have with the Blu-Ray DRM is the HDCP part. Basically requires me to toss the rest of my system out because I don’t have the right output going to my TV. No thanks.

The stuff preventing me from copying the disc is annoying, but livable. Having to replace half my rig so that I can’t exploit the analog hole is not.

HD, HDPC, HDMI, DVI, DVI, PRI, CMI, FBI… Bah humbug. I hate how complicated all of this crap has gotten, and I grew up at a time when you made your computer run better using solder and EPROM burners. I’m not a technophobe. I’m just too lazy to make going to Wally World to buy a new TV into an extended research project. Bleck. Who cares?

I’ve bought Star Wars too many times as it is, thanks. I don’t really need to count Princess Leia’s nose hair.

I do have to chuckle a little at the people bitching about $25 Blu-Ray movies though. Hell, it used to be blank VHS tapes cost more than that, and movies were up to $100, and that was call it 1982 dollars.

No, it just displays my lack of wanting to throw away money on another potentially failed Sony format.

It’s not a Sony format. Sony is just one of the 18 board members of Blu-ray Disc Association.

You could just as well say that you don’t want to throw away money on another potentially failed Warner Bros. format.

when is there going to be an .MKV file support on XboX? it supports DivX so why not hd rips too?

anyone knows how to playback .MKV’s in Vista (or XP) Media Center?

This is all very entertaining to read!

I remember a lot of the same arguments when the formats changed from VHS to DVD, the players were several hundreds ( or $? first one then the other) the discs were ludicrously priced and many TV’s (y’know those old Cathode Ray tube devices) didn’t have the right connections like scart.
Then it all changed as VHS was phased out and bargain players and movies came out. Now in the UK we can buy a separate DVD player for under 20 and buy films for 2-5, combine that with sales in HMV or similar and it is all very cheap now.
Unfortunately this whole HD thing is all about getting those stupidly big TV’s to actually look good, which is pretty ridiculous as most people (in the UK at least) would need to either move house or have major building works done to actually get one in their house and have the appropriate distance between themselves and the screen otherwise your gonna see those pixels anyway or give yourself major neck strain looking up at the screen.
I have yet to see a new display at the old size of 28inches look better with a HD input than it looks on the older DVD format, even the LCD/Plasma TV’s of that size still look shit! Go to any electrical store to see what I mean.

Anyhow, if Blu-Ray was to gain the acceptance and popularity of other previous formats then it will only happen if DVD was phased out and this would only happen if they were cheap enough. Given the popularity of downloaded/streamed content and as someone rightly pointed out the cheapness of solid state storage I really don’t think there will be a phasing out of DVD discs in favour of Blu-Ray discs, more likely a phasing out of discs in favour of downloads or flash memory storage.

Also I do think the incompatibility of many different elements of the technology is a major obstacle to wide-spread adoption - too many different ways to do the same bloody thing!

apparently, i’ve been solving so many problems with this DVD burning thing, I’ve turned myself into a problem, LOLZ.
If you look carefully however, that isn’t true. Technology standards are pretty lame in large institutions like universities, govt offices and so on. People all through the hierarchy do not use Blu-Ray. High speed broadband, maybe made pervasive by wireless, would’ve probably been the best thing to do, but alas! the profit margins don’t quite look sexy for bright globe-trotting geniuses trained to solve problems. So, we have to sit and discuss Blu-ray here.
Imagine what Jini had promised long ago - back in 1993 - with today’s spread of the internet. (Hey, I just noticed its too bright and sunny for my strained eyes… er… umm… whatever… sorry…)
Pervasive free wireless, I must move to Mountain View, really!
But Mountain View is blurred and foggy aaprently, this time of the year, so since it’s not that clear, maybe it will interfere with digital signals… The rest of us who dont live in Mountain View need BluRayz??? LOLZZZZZZ!!!
I’ve been tossing around a few discs lately, its not a funny thing, you know, considering the wait and seek times. Lead time is the worst. Hah! M$ has a good set of ways to cut through this, but they never respond to the real end-user market’s demands. They try to decide what the market will be and what is fit for the kids and so on. So, we are here, the tech community, some of us wanting to make transfer of information better and faster and cheaper, and others M$ busy doing their own stuff, totally not communicating with the end-users for feedback. M$ collude with the lawmakers to make grand announcements but don’t deliver. Same old story over the decades.
Why do they brand and package things as new and revolutionary?
Did I digress, transgress?
All I want is general progress in this technology and discussion.
System broken :frowning:

P.S. Jeff, I really do think you should add some different fruit to your Captcha salad but the Gothic script is quite fetchingly Gangsta!

It’s all sad really. Sheep driven to conspicuous consumption.

It kind of assumes that Blu-Ray will actually have a time and won’t be bypassed by whatever comes next. The interest in DVD was more about the compactness and the disc format and the fact that it didn’t degrade in quality over time, I think, than anything else. A lot of people went in and bought big DVD libraries based on those factors that they won’t want to go and re-buy (and this was a significant factor in DVD’s success – sales of the back library), and now we’re heading into difficult economic times.

I think BluRay may become a bit like LaserDisc…

Jeff, why don’t you change your blog’s name to Jeff’s Tech Shopping Sellout, or if you would like to stay credible, at least disclose what you make from your direct product links to NewEgg, Amazon, etc. Product placement in movies and TV shows is lame, but blogging about products so you can make a commission on 'em is borderline sleazy.

@codinghorror I’ve got the same mobo for my HTPC, but can’t find the right driver/software combination to play blu-ray - what do you use?

I think the sampled differences in the quoted articles would be more meaningful if the screen captures were both adjusted to the sRGB color profile from their respective NTSC and HDTV profiles. The HDTV picture should have superior colour and contrast, not merely be darker and duller, as presented, which is purely an artifact of presentation. The differences lie not just in the number of pixels, but in issues such as compression artifacts and width of color gamut.

Using optical audio with a blu-ray player is essentially utilizing only half of the player’s power. Uncompressed audio tracks are leaps and bounds better than standard dolby digital or DTS (in the same sense that 1080p is leaps and bounds better than 480p). With how cheap HDMI audio decoding receivers have gotten, there is no excuse to not feed the uncompressed LPCM signal straight into the receiver. I have no idea whether a modern pc can send the audio track over hdmi, but it should be able to. I think this is something most people tend to overlook for one reason or another – they shouldn’t, sound is 1/2 of the package.

For the individual who said if P$3’s lowered by $100 they’d buy it, the stand alone cost for each would be considerably more. You get a better deal buying the P$3, even if it was the 40g unit, as you can upgrade with a larger, cheaper-to-buy HDD.

But for those who only want blu-ray, definitely get the OEM drive. Take advantage of the technology while you are still young…don’t wait another 10 years for something else, or to see if blu-ray caught on. Just rent the movie, don’t buy.

stebe,

Are you kidding? Sounds like commercialismistic-paranoia has crept up on you. Even so, who cares what ppl get comped for promoting (not saying he is), this is how it is. Step outside, you’ll see.

I read an article (wish I had the link but sadly I don’t) that felt that BlueRay would only last five years before being replaced by something better.

As someone who routinely uses a media center for playing all my videos, I would much rather have a blue-ray quality service that streamed video I would watch than have to store all those discs.

That said, i don’t think bandwidth will be plentiful enough to make that a reality for several years so in the mean time, jumping on the BlueRay bandwagon for a few years wouldn’t be a bad idea.