Blu-ray to copy films to laptops (and other devices)

[s8ist]

Blu-ray to copy films to laptops(News)

by Rob Purchese

11/01/07 11:52


Blu-ray DVDs are to include a feature that will allow copies of films to be transferred to laptops or other devices.
It's an effort by Sony to gain wider acceptance of its new format and, more importantly, rival Microsoft's HD-DVD technology.
Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week, head of Sony's home entertainment unit, David Bishop, indicated that we'll see this feature soon.
"It's not currently part of anything on our current release schedule, but we'll probably roll it out sometime this year."
Which sounds rather familiar. Take with a pinch of salt.
Blu-ray famously holds more than five-times as much data as a normal DVD, and Sony have already claimed that games are filling the impressive 25GB capacity. What exactly are they filling it with? We can only hazard a guess.

Interesting strategy... Will it work?

 

[csschrot]

I wouldn't think the studios would like this. Once on the laptop or other divece what is to keep it from spreading. Talk about file sharing.

 

[s8ist]

I would assume some kind of DRM.. Once that is cracked though, Hollywood would not be too happy. However, these files are undoubtedly lower quality versions of the film encoded to various transferrable formats... Perhaps an iPod h.264, and a DVD-quality file for laptops. Seeing as how a DVD-Ripped divx is usually available fairly quickly, they might not have a problem with lower quality files being circulated. After all, non-hdcp compliant devices still send out a down-rezzed copyable image. I think once a higher quality distribution sprouts up, Hollywood starts to focus its fascist protection measures on the latest and greatest.

 

[damaged]

I'll wager it will allow you to copy movies to laptops, sure, alongside some kind of protection scheme that won't really protect anything, and will only serve to ruin honest peoples laptops with shoddy DRMware.

 

[s8ist]

Agreed, but will the average consumer see it that way, or will it be a point that sways public opinion in favor of Blu-Ray as the next platform? Also, will studios find DRM and lower res files undesirable? I think they can handle it if Sony can pull of quick adoption of the platform... then again, studios are probably not happy with Sony right now b/c BR isn't taking off so hot.

 

[John Kotches]

This sounds like Mandatory Managed Copy which has been available for HD-DVD since day one

Ok, so you wanna store some Blu-rays centrally. That's 40 25GB discs or 20 50GB discs per TB of online storage. Not practical yet. Even with a RAID-5 array of the new Hitachi 1TB spindles you'd run out of space pretty rapidly.

Cheers,