Tag: blu ray
Standards group pushing for single Blu-ray licensing organisation
Now that Blu-ray has successfully crushed that young HD DVD upstart ‘neath its sizeable heel, there’s that whole messy business of streamlining the business into something workable – you know, so that you won’t need to sell off a spare kidney to buy a player and that a movie collection won’t cost you the remaining one. One idea being aired by MPEG LA, the standards and licensing group, is that there should be a single organisation set up to handle the licensing of all the many and varied patents necessary to make a proper Blu-ray product.
The $25,000 ITC One entertainment home warehouse adds Blu-ray support
It’s unlikely many of you are in the market for an ITC One, what with the gigantic SE2 Labs home entertainment solution costing about as much as a small Korean family hatchback.
The ITC One’s around the size of two PC cases, and already contains an Xbox 360, Wii, HD PVR, surround sound amp and processor, plus an iPod dock because every new electrical product launched
HD DVD owners in Switzerland can trade for Blu-ray players, sez Sony
Bless the Swiss. Not only do they give the rest of the world chocolate, Swiss cheese, and beautiful people, but they’re also offering HD DVD owners the opportunity to trade in their obsolete format for a Blu-ray player.
Surprisingly, it’s Sony who’re offering the trade, marking Switzerland as the first country on the map to do so. When buying the BDP-S500…
Laptop specialist Rock grudgingly offers Blu-ray support
Hardcore power-laptop maker Rock has decided to dump its HD DVD-exclusive stance and let buyers stick Blu-ray drives in its range of gaming laptop beasts should they so desire.
Rock’s CEO Nick Boardman said “We’re disappointed that HD-DVD didn’t make it and we value the support Toshiba has given us. Although Blu-ray has technical advantages…
Future MacBook Pros may come with in-built Blu-ray drive
Those rumourmongers over at AppleInsider suggest that built-in Blu-ray drives could soon be a reality for Apple’s MacBook Pro notebook computers. An “insider” reckons that Apple are in talks with Sony to provide the hardware.
If reports are true, quality issues were to blame for delaying a Blu-ray launch with the latest line of MacBook Pros.
We’ve been waiting a long time for Apple to take an active decision on including high definition drives as a standard or an option on its range of computers. Unless the company chooses to ignore HD altogether for now, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that Blu-ray drives will be added soon enough.
Dreamworks kills off HD DVD titles, no Blu-ray until the summer
Yesterday, over at HDTV UK, I responded to the news that Dreamworks somehow remained tied to the HD DVD format, despite Toshiba effectively killing it off.
Today, Dreamworks has announced that it’s killing off the HD DVD format, by not releasing any currently planned or future discs in the format. However, for either contractual or technical reasons — I’m not sure which — they won’t be producing Blu-ray discs until the summer.
Watch Blu-ray films on your PC with the Philips PLDS DX-401S optical drive
A new Blu-ray optical drive has been announced from Philips and Lite-On Digital Solutions, the excitingly-named DX-401S.
Launching in April, the read-only disc drive can read all DVD+/-R(W), CD-R(W) and Blu-ray discs, with single layer speeds…
Think Blu-ray players are too expensive? How about a $17k model?
Hopefully, Blu-ray players will continue to come down in price, even though rival format HD DVD has fallen out of contention. However, there’s always room at the top end of the market for super-expensive models for crazy rich people. To wit: Goldmund’s Eidos 20 BD.
Panasonic's DMP-BD30 Blu-ray player is out next week, for £349
Panasonic’s DMP-BD30 has been given a UK release date of next week, several months after the US market had an opportunity to marvel at the ‘next-generationalness’ of the $499.95 player.
With full 1080p playback, it also features *deep breath* Final Standard Profile functionality, picture-in-picture, audio mixing, Panasonic’s…
New Blu-ray players from Sony announced, the BDP-S350 and BDP-S550
UK pricing and availability hasn’t been confirmed for these two new Blu-ray models, but at US$400 and $500 respectively we can probably expect them to be around £400 and £500 each if Sony glance upon XE.com and choose to ignore what they’re told.
The two models, the BDP-S350 and BDP-S550 both contain Ethernet ports enabling BD-Live content to be perused and even downloaded if the user fancies, to a USB device plugged into the USB port. Other similarities include Sony’s picture-in-picture BonusView, and upscaling of DVDs to 1080p.
The only differences appear to be in the audio department, with the S550 having 7.1 channel analogue outputs and supporting DTS-HD and Master audio support, with both supporting Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus as expected. They can…
