Blu-ray / HD-DVD PC players

Khannie

Anyone know if these players are available for PC's? If so, what kind of processing power will be required to display 1080p? What about if it's scaled to 720p? Will the discs contain 720p versions?

Oh, any hardware support coming to the video cards?

(anyone know about linux support for these formats in general?...dvd support wasn't available for linux, and caused the copy protection system to be broken as a result...by a 16 or 17 year old. gg.)

PogMoThoin

Burners only: https://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=323673

look at the price :eek:

Khannie

FECK ME. :eek:

PogMoThoin

Word is that when the PS3 comes out with Blu Ray that MS will be releasing a HD DVD add-on for X-box 360. Might be worth the wait.

Ruu_Old

I think I'll be waiting a while for one of these so. Hmm 'business expense' me thinks.

kaisersose77

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/microsoft-and-toshiba-demo-the-xbox-360-hd-dvd-and-2nd-gen-hd-dvd-players-207254.php

the 360 hd-dvd drive is out november/december and will be 200 euros over here and $200 over in the US. There bound to have it working with pc's soon after it's released and i doubt MS would care seeing as it'll increase sales for them.

Tippex

PogMoThoin wrote:

Word is that when the PS3 comes out with Blu Ray that MS will be releasing a HD DVD add-on for X-box 360. Might be worth the wait.

According to the star (so it must be true) the 360 HD DVD will be available from next month for €199....

8T8

The burners are also players.

But a few conditions must be met before you can play..
* If using DVI you must have a HDCP compliant graphics card & display.
* If using VGA you do not need a HDCP compliant graphics card but can fall victim to the image constraint token if present in a disc which will force it to play at a lower resolution.
* Player software is only available from Cyberlink & Intervideo - though some drives are shipping with the player software, early bundles were not.
* The players will only work with approved graphics drivers so if you chop & change frequently well expect issues.

You can forget about official Linux support.

Khannie

8T8 wrote:

You can forget about official Linux support.

Stupid really....it sets 1,000,000+ odd highly trained geeks on a mission to break whatever the encryption methodology is. It's the kind of thing that I'd put my coding skills to work for. I have no intention of going back to windows, and I _LOVE_ high def stuff.

Makaveli

PogMoThoin wrote:

Burners only: https://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=323673

look at the price :eek:

Look at the price of the media, 5 discs for €100.

8T8

I know they are just asking for trouble by locking out linux but as far as the backers are concerned they don't care. They probably think that by keeping it away from linux there is less of a chance of it being broken :rolleyes:

But there are fairly nasty provisions in the AACS system if it is broken as keys can be revoked for {hardware} players that are compromised so any discs that ship after a player is cracked could be blacklisted.

Could be quite a while before whatever HD format rules is playable under linux.

Your best bet is to probably get a future HD enabled Mac and dual boot if Windows is too much too bear

projectmayhem

just as an aside, some leet haxors are trying to hax blu-ray drives to play hd-dvds, since technically the specs on a blu-ray player means the only reason they don't play hd-dvd discs is security

8T8

I wouldn't put much faith in that, although the technologies are based of a similar blue laser tech the Blu-ray drives do not feature the controller chips to even know what a HD-DVD is & vice verse. Plus the Blu-ray drives laser reads the disc at a much more closer level than the HD-DVD drives.

I would suspect any tampering of the firmware will no doubt have some sort of consequence as well.

Security wise they are very similar both use AACS but Blu-ray goes a step further with the BD+ mark.

easy_as_easy

there was a great article about this in the independent (english) t'other day.

basically said that dvd's will be released with both formats on them

kaisersose77

i think i read the hd-dvd discs have the normal dvd version on the other side of the disc atm, so ppl could buy a movie they wanted on hd-dvd even though they only have a dvd player atm but they could play it on the hd-dvd player when they become cheaper and save them buying the same movie again.

edit:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/x/xbox360hddvdplayer/

"Only HD DVD offers a 'combo' disk: DVD on one side allows playback on all your existing DVD players in your home or car."

Handy for ppl who like to collect movies i suppose and the movies dont seem much dearer the dvd versions ( well for new movies anyways )

http://play.com/DVD/HD%20DVD/NAVMAIN/5-/RegionHome.html

unklerosco

Dual HD/blue ray players will be out next year.. The chip is on the way that'll read both discs so the "format wars" will be no more...

I think allot of people are gonna make a huge mistake buying into this tech to early... Im gonna wait till Laser tvs r released, by then HD/blue ray will be established n Hi-def tv will be widely avail... Im more interested in the tv side of things...

rogue-entity

Well, Intervideo is perfectly able to release a linux player, it wouldnt be much different than the Mac OS X version considering the massive similaritys between MacOS and Linux. If certified drivers are a requirement, nVidea graphics cards are your best bet as nVidea already have Linux drivers available.

What burns me up with all these copy protections is the annoying inability to create an interoperable system that keeps everybody happy regardless of platform. For example, they could supply compatable decryption hardware as a daugher-card on your graphics card so regardless of OS, decryption is possible.

Now, what really annoys me about BluRay is how they pissed over europe when they drew up the Region coding (which IMO is a load of bollox). America, Japan and most of Asia get region 1. We get Region 2 and the rest of the world gets Region 3. Why for the love of all things couldnt they have at least added the UK and Ireland to Region 1 after all, we speak the same language as America and a lot of us buy R1 DVDs anyway.

SeanW

Well, at the moment I personally have two DVD drives one for Region 1 and the other for Region 2, god I so hate region lockouts, makes it an absolute bitch to move from the US to Ireland and so on.

I hope the hackers succed in breaking the new security standards to shreds.

godtabh

PC world had a Sony desktop with Blu-Ray. Co-st about €2500 and the specs were only average

projectmayhem

SeanW wrote:

Well, at the moment I personally have two DVD drives one for Region 1 and the other for Region 2, god I so hate region lockouts, makes it an absolute bitch to move from the US to Ireland and so on.

you got two dvd drives for different regions? you do realise there are ways around those locks, via software (slysoft anyDVD for example)...

SeanW

no I wanted two optical drives anyway so it kinda made sense to set them both to different regions.

8T8

rogue-entity wrote:

Well, Intervideo is perfectly able to release a linux player, it wouldnt be much different than the Mac OS X version considering the massive similaritys between MacOS and Linux. If certified drivers are a requirement, nVidea graphics cards are your best bet as nVidea already have Linux drivers available.

What burns me up with all these copy protections is the annoying inability to create an interoperable system that keeps everybody happy regardless of platform. For example, they could supply compatable decryption hardware as a daugher-card on your graphics card so regardless of OS, decryption is possible.

Now, what really annoys me about BluRay is how they pissed over europe when they drew up the Region coding (which IMO is a load of bollox). America, Japan and most of Asia get region 1. We get Region 2 and the rest of the world gets Region 3. Why for the love of all things couldnt they have at least added the UK and Ireland to Region 1 after all, we speak the same language as America and a lot of us buy R1 DVDs anyway.

They indeed are perfectly capable of releasing a linux player but doing so is another matter entirely as is adding HDCP support into linux which may not go down well at all due to the licensing terms.


Region encoding is indeed retarded you think they would have have coped on by now, the bad news if the HD-DVD format will be getting region encoding as well they just agreed on the specification even though the format has already launched without region encoding, which was an actual advantage it had way to go HD-DVD camp :rolleyes: .

There is one interesting rumour floating around that the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive can be plugged into a PC and will work a regular optical drive. At the moment HD-DVD support is not available but they were rather ambiguous about it indicating a possible shift in the future maybe.

Frankly they would be wise to do it, the HD-DVD format isn't doing too well for PC's as Toshiba (the primary backer of HD-DVD) realistically has no optical drive partners in the HD-DVD camp, they once had NEC but NEC setup a joint venture with Sony's optical drive unit and the NEC HD-DVD drives quietly faded away.

{NEC did recently announce a chip that supports both HD-DVD & Blu-ray but the odds of such a drive being built are slim, I think Lite-On mentioned HD-DVD support but they will only commit if they think the format is going to take off}

Toshiba's PC optical drive unit has a joint venture with Samsung (another Blu-ray backer) so the PC side is not looking too great bar whatever Toshiba themselves can produce. Blu-ray on other hand has the support of pretty much all the optical drive companies with new drives in the pipeline or already available.