Malik wrote:What about those Blu-Ray discs? Did it really take off? I remember PS3 made big news with BR as the future of media - but seeing Xbox360 plays the same games as the PS3, without a Blu-Ray drive, did it really matter? What about it's impact on home movies? It's been a very long time since I bought a DVD movie. I don't have a Blu-Ray movie player. I just watch whatever movies the cable shows if I have the mood, and the cable broadcasts HD signals via HDMI.
The new Xbox will use Blu-ray as well, as well as the PlayStation 3 and 4. For the actual games, it's a boon on the PlayStation 3 imho - there are a lot of games on Xbox360 that have to come on multiple DVDs (and require switching the discs out to continue playing), whereas the PlayStation 3 just keeps trucking. It would be nice to see PC games go this route instead of shipping 2-3-4 DVDs that you have to install from. But I doubt that'll ever happen.
Blu-ray movies for at home I'm not sure about; I have a single player and a few movies here and there for it - I notice that it tends to be less expensive to buy "box set" kind of movies on Blu-ray, but for the most part the thing sits powered off and I keep using my trusty DVD player. At stores where I tend to find DVDs to purchase, they usually have a very small section (sometimes only an end-cap) for Blu-ray, and the selection is usually pretty limited; I'm not sure if that speaks to adoption or anything of that sort. I don't think it's a terrible format (that is, a 50GB disc the size of a CD that reads faster and is more durable is a great idea), but I think the politics surrounding it (DRM and such) have probably done it a disservice.
Gemini000 wrote:
The amount of DRM present on commercial Blu-Ray discs is INSANE. x_x;
Basically, if you don't have a dedicated Blu-Ray Player that can connect to the internet, or don't mind spending $100+ on software which may or may not work to play them back on a computer, then you're pretty much stuck using not-quite-legit means to watch them, even if you have the ability to read Blu-Ray discs. I used to have a workaround with VLC Player, but said workaround stopped working out of the blue for arbitrary reasons, so I spent almost an entire day trying to find another workaround and ended up using a combination of XBMC with a plugin that runs another program that's usually used to rip through all the DRM present to make copies, but can be invoked for streaming purposes too, so it just does that, and even if this method continues to work, it's not going to remain free forever since the program that breaks through the DRM is going to cost $50 once it's out of beta.
My Blu-ray player has no connection to the Internet (it is capable, but it is not hooked up) and has never had issues with disc playback - it's a Yamaha from 2008 or 2009 for whatever that's worth. It's only ever had "issues" with two discs - the movie Red it hangs on loading (a firmware update helped this along some, but it still hangs; in the disc's defense, it does warn you on the packaging and its initial splash screen that it will probably hang - I have no idea WHY this is so, but it is), and it doesn't like the 3D interactive menus on Pirates of the Caribbean (it probably doesn't have enough processing power to draw everything the menu wants, it loads the disc up pretty quickly, but the faster you can get it through the menus the better). Otherwise it's just as seamless as my DVD and HD-DVD (yeah, bought one of those) players - disc in and it loads right up. A lot of times just as quickly as it would load a DVD. Now of course it takes it longer to boot itself up than a DVD player, but that's not a huge problem in my book (the amount of time it takes to start itself up is usually at least as long as it takes me to pick a movie and find it).
On PC I tried HD-DVD playback a few years ago with the Xbox360 HD-DVD drive (side note: these are excellent external DVD drives in their own right - they were going pretty cheap a few years ago too), using Corel software - it worked "okay" (couldn't get multi-channel streams from the disc, scaling wasn't always perfect, etc) for a few months and then refused to play HD-DVDs due to DRM, so I just uninstalled it and kept-on using the hardware player. I've heard/read that Blu-ray playback is just as buggy - for example what you've said re-enforces that. It's nothing I've ever seriously pursued on the PC as a result.
Ironically, I think the massive amount of DRM is why Blu-Ray ultimately won out to HD-DVD, since HD-DVD only had a QUARTER of the amount of different DRM methods going on, and the television/movie/music industry is still very pro-DRM, even though numerous studies now have shown that DRM actually REDUCES net income from a product rather than boost it. 😜
Can you provide some clarification on this? I'm not doubting you - I just want to read more about it. 😀