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(Page 3 of 3 pages for this article « First  <  1 2 3)

Monday, February 25, 2008

Blu-ray Won - What’s Next For…

OK - Blu-ray won. Now what? Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, etc.

APPLE

Apple isn’t making me happy of late, even though I love their stuff in general and am a total Mac junkie. After pulling out of NAB citing rising costs and better uses to reach their clients, I read between the lines to see that Apple doesn’t have significant product to release this year. Someone else was noting that Apple tends to have big and little years at NAB, and this is going to be a little year. So I’ll read that as no significant new Final Cut Pro relases, no significant new hardware, and that would include a Blu-ray burner and new DVD Studio Pro if they were going to have it. It is a bit hard to read the pull-out of NAB - how drastic a move is it? We won’t know till we get closer. When Avid pulled out, it was universally hailed as “Uh oh, they are in trouble.” But now that Apple has as well, we have to re-evaluate that stance.

But I’m thinking it likely that Apple isn’t ready to go Blu-ray yet, and that troubles me greatly.

Apple has been a bit schizophrenic about high def disc support - at MWSF 2005 (yep, that far back, I double checked) Steve Jobs got up on stage with then head of Sony and talked about how this would be the year of high def, and that we’d have Blu-ray burners in Macs in the near future. Fast forward THREE YEARS - that’s a geological era in computer years - and we STILL don’t have Blu-ray burners. OK, that’s hardware. What about software?

Apple figured out fairly early on how to make HD DVD content that could be burned to regular DVDs, and would play (at first) on Macs with sufficiently updated software and fast enough hardware, and eventually (painfully long time, just about a year now) would play properly on set top boxes (we had to wait until firmware updates for players came out and DVD Studio Pro was updated till it all worked well together). But no HD DVD burners ever came to light.

So now, we wait for a Blu-ray burner, which does not seem to be forthcoming. I hope Apple has a pre-NAB press event as they usually do, and they give us SOME hope on that front.

BTW - my advice? The PS3 is the best deal going on Blu-ray players - most readily upgradeable, most capable, and Oh Yeah! You can play PS3 games on it too. It does a great job uprezzing regular DVDs, and the only downside as a hardware device is that it is pretty loud, you have to get custom interface cables (LAME!), and you have to buy an aftermarket reomte if you don’t want to fast forward with a game controller. The remote is also Bluetooth only - sexy and modern until you realize you can’t integrate those functions into a universal remote that doesn’t have Bluetooth - which is most of them. So you HAVE to have a second remote. Bummer.

AVID

Avid has already had Blu-ray authoring support for some time, so no great shakes for them - they are ready, they’ve been ready. Good for them.

So, in summary:

Toshiba - KO’d on this one - they lost
Sony - winner take all, but dunno how big “all” is going to be - will Blu-ray simply be Laserdisc 2.0? We don’t know yet
Consumers - winners in that there is a clear victor after a relatively short format war, but HD DVD early adopters are the casualties, and now price competition will ease on Blu-ray players. I predict slow sales drops until the Christmas push.
Microsoft - taking a hit on this one, but they’ll persevere and adapt
Adobe - sitting pretty with their nicely integrated suite and multi-format publishing capabilities, sure to be a hit with the enterprise video crowd. Apple - you listening?
Apple - sucking rocks this minute as to this issue with no burners, no sofware support for the winning format. Yo Apple devs - get on it!
Avid - already had Blu-ray authoring, so no need for them to fret either.

OK, that’s it for now, tune in next episode…

-mike

Hardware •

(Page 3 of 3 pages for this article « First  <  1 2 3)


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Adam Wilt | 11/03- 06:19 PM

I agree wholeheartedly. There are a few other fringe players, like Toshiba’s HD on a standard (red) DVD, and the VMD standard pushed out of China, but they are irrelevant to the production community.

I noted as much on my very similarly themed article on this, written about the same time:
http://techthoughts.org/2008/02/27/hd-dvd-dead-lets-move-on/

Posted by Anthony Burokas  on  03/01  at  05:48 AM

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