This sounds a little strange at first, don’t you think ? I really had to investigate the matter further, let us check out what this is all about. The Australian PC World revealed the new Blue-Ray drive about three weeks ago on their website.
“Sony cautions that additional software and hardware is required for playback of commercial movies on Blu-ray Disc (BD-ROM) but the company didn’t specify exactly what is required.”
No one was sure what that ment at that time - until today. Cdfreaks report that Sony’s BWU-100A Blu-ray drive will not play Blu-ray movies which is exactly what Sony ment when they gave this statement to PC World.
“While the drive would be more than capable of reading Blu-ray discs for the playback of HD video content, the problem is due to the main issue that plagues all next generation formats for movies: The Infamous Copy protection. With the lack of PCs available that have HDCP enabled graphics cards and playback software still in its development, Sony has decided to leave out support for commercial BD movies altogether. However, the drive will still be able to play back user-created HD content, such as from a high definition camcorder, where no copy protection is required.“
PC World Australia asked Sony’s product manager Vincent Bautista for data storage about this matter, he explained..
“..that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format.
Bautista says that one of two reasons for this is the fact that commercial content is encrypted with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), which can only be decrypted using a HDCP-compliant graphics card that offers DVI or HDMI connections. Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that support HDCP, this isn’t yet possible.
The second reason, according to Bautista, is that BD playback software that can decrypt HDCP isn’t “released as a saleable item yet“.
This means in other words that people who are actually buying this Blue-Ray drive are not getting what they bargained for. A Blue-Ray drive that is not playing copy-protected movies ? C’mon who needs such a drive ? It is capable of writing disks which could be a good argument for a purchase.
Looking at the prices for Blue-Ray discs makes me wonder how many users will use this feature instead of using a different method to backup their data. The price of ten Blue-Ray discs is greater than that of a large external hard drive for example. Oh, I forgot, the Blue-Ray drive itself will cost around 750$. Pretty expensive for something that has a limited functionality, don’t you think ?
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