Blu-ray and Apple (1 Viewer)

[Sam Posten]

Interesting results:
Gizmodo - Are You Finally Ready To Replace Your DVD Player With Blu-Ray? - Blu-Ray

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Adam Gregorich and I were out in Los Angeles last week and stopped
by Panasonic to see our friends over there.
Adam was handed Panasonic's new portable DVD player that is due
to be released in a few months. I think it is the first portable player
of its kind.
Of course, Adam was not allowed to keep it, but he was able to take
it home and review it for this forum. Hopefully he will have a review
up shortly.
On quick observation the player looked no bigger or bulkier than
most portable DVD players out there. The battery was certainly small
and it contained a built-in stand and car headrest attachment.

 

[Craig S]

Because you don't send hard disks in the mail or to customer sites.

But some people have started doing EXACTLY that. On Mac Break Weekly Alex Lindsay from the Pixel Corps has stated that they have been delivering projects to clients on Drobo's (the cost is built-in to their fees). The client plugs it into a USB port, plugs in the power, and they're good to go. He says their clients are delighted with this solution.
Sam, you've been very vocal for quite some time about wanting a BD option in your MacBookPro. I'm curious - why?? Just to back up photos? Although I agree with Dave & Ted on this issue, I'm not trying to be combative. I'm genuinely curious as to why this is such a big deal to you.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

May I step in and state why Blu-ray on a Mac is important for me?
High Definition Camcorders.
I take a fair amount of footage while on vacation using a high definition
camcorder.
That footage has to be dumbed down for DVD. It still looks good, but
I would rather be able to burn it to Blu-ray and watch it in its
uncompressed glory.
Now granted, I could just hook the camcorder up to my HD display
and watch it that way. However, for archival purposes and for sharing
with friends and family, I like to have an authored disc complete with
menus and chapter stops.
Finally, when it comes to backing up things I don't like external hard
drives, that is, unless they are solid state (which is just coming into
its own). Drives break. I would rather be able to back up huge amounts
of data (several DVDs worth) onto one single BD disc.

 

[Carlo_M]

Ron, in your post #22 above, did you mean Adam got the portable BD player? If so, that would be very cool.
And yes, I too have wished to burn data backup on a Blu-ray disc. Nothing like getting 50GBs on a disc especially with my Canon DSLR taking 15MB RAW files a pop. I plan on getting an HD camcorder in the near future, and I find that my data, music and movie files are consistently totaling in the gigabyte range, making DVD (even dual layer) not really a feasible backup option without having hundreds on hand.
I do have terabytes of HDs, but HDs fail. Yes I know discs can fail as well, but they tend to last longer and as people have said, it's cheaper to burn two copies of a disc for backup than to keep buying hard drive after hard drive, or setting up RAID configurations.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Yes, they gave Adam one of the first final product samples to review.

 

[Carlo_M]

Damn sexy! I'm about to go on a long plane flight and I really wish I had one of those to keep me occupied!

 

[Ted Todorov]

May I step in and state why Blu-ray on a Mac is important for me?
High Definition Camcorders.
I take a fair amount of footage while on vacation using a high definition
camcorder.
That footage has to be dumbed down for DVD. It still looks good, but
I would rather be able to burn it to Blu-ray and watch it in its
uncompressed glory.
Now granted, I could just hook the camcorder up to my HD display
and watch it that way. However, for archival purposes and for sharing
with friends and family, I like to have an authored disc complete with
menus and chapter stops.
Finally, when it comes to backing up things I don't like external hard
drives, that is, unless they are solid state (which is just coming into
its own). Drives break. I would rather be able to back up huge amounts
of data (several DVDs worth) onto one single BD disc.

In my case I have a Mac (my MacPro, used to be a Mini) permanently hooked up to the HDTV (indeed 90%+ of my HD viewing comes from the Mac -- HDTV via EyeTV recordings, iTunes HD downloads, upscaled DVDs). Also, as mentioned above none of my relatives and only one friend has BD capability so sending BDs to people won't work either. I also respectfully disagree with Ron about the relative safety of backups -- I think that two HDs are safer than a (DVD/BD)-R disk. Hard drives can be sent off site as well. What is the current price per TB of BD-Rs and what is the coaster rate when burning?
Sam: How large are the client files in question, if you don't mind me asking? Larger then 8.5GB each (DL-DVD-R capacity)?
Don't get me wrong people -- I would LOVE a BD drive on my Mac, because I want to be able to watch BDs as well without having to hook up yet another separate player and encounter the WAF. Please Apple, give us BD! I just don't think it is happening, for the reasons I've laid out in previous posts.

 

[Sam Posten]

Again, remember I am an AMATEUR Photographer. I don't get paid for this. All of my Mac gear, all of my photo gear, all of my video gear supports my obsession with being a documentarian of my somewhat banal and pedestrian existance. I am not an artist. I don't covet fame. I just want to take pictures and videos in high quality that will last me my lifetime and if I ever have any kids they and the rest of my family might treasure through their lifetimes.
And as an amateur I am accumulating over 10GB of raw files and final output per month, minimum. I am an outlier as an amateur but I suspect my needs are quite tame compared to a real working professional photographer. At a friends-friends wedding I shot 500+ images at 12MB each, and that was kinda small for me, do the math. The crappy jpeg finals which show up on Flickr are nowhere near as compelling as their color correct equivalents on my hard drive and which come out pixel perfect in the prints which I have matched to Costco's amazing looking and economical large format printer. I do a dozen 8x12s per project and often hundreds of 4x6s. It's my hobby and passion. At the 3 day HTF meetups in Vegas and Hollywood I took over 2000 shots each event. I am over 50000 shots in my main library alone. I am getting better about throwing away the real trash but you never know when that shot of some booth babe turns out to be a Playboy Playmate of the Year:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kadath/883327906/
To keep up with this I am using hard disks and DVDs. I probably should have a Drobo but I think they too are one rev away from 'really' getting it right and when they do I will get one. I do all of this whether I am home or on the road. If its a quiet flight I can take 100 snaps without bothering anyone just out my airplane window! Backing up on the road is something I am totally paranoid about. I am the single point of failure there, so I make sure to not erase any cards till I get home and if I have to I will back up to usb portable and kick off a DVD burn of as many as I can just before I go to sleep. But that doesnt always get me all my images for a weekend where a BD would.
My consumer level video camera has a 120GB hard disk. I would like to dump those files to both a BD-Data disk AND be able to make 'plug and play in any BD reader' video disks just as you can today with DVD.
Have you seen Reverie by Vincent Laforet from the 5D Mark 2? As amazing as that is this is the FIRST DSLR that is capable of doing 1080P without a sweat. I am loving the D5000s 720P videos but I want the whole kit and caboodle for my next camera, 1080p and full iso/aperture/shutter speed selectability like the canons have. It will come, and the files will be huge!
Vincent Laforet : photos : Reverie- powered by SmugMug
Canon Digital Learning Center - Sample EOS 5D Mark II Video: Reverie
Here is what I can do today with no tripod, Streaming:
Cannon Fire on Vimeo
Full size:
http://www.navesink.net/public_html/...CannonFire.mov
And files are only going to get bigger and more detailed from there. Even more so when Image Stabilization comes along and you give no thought to not lugging a tripod around everywhere.
Again, I am an outlier but my needs are not fantasy and they are even more real for real pros.

 

[Craig S]

Ron, you still have a Mac Pro, right? Why don't you just buy a third-party BD burner and a copy of Toast? You'll be all set to author Blu-Rays. No need to wait on Apple to come around.
Sam, I hear what you're saying. I know a Blu burner would be useful for you. But for how long? As you say, the files are getting bigger. Don't get me wrong, I believe Apple should have offered a Blu option by now, at least on the Mac Pros and MacBook Pros. It's just that I also believe that the "sweet spot" in time for Blu's maximum effectiveness as a storage medium has already passed.

Again, I am an outlier but my needs are not fantasy and they are even more real for real pros.

The following is strictly anecdotal, but I listen to some photography podcasts hosted by pros (TWIP, Photofocus). They're all Mac guys. They talk about backup a lot, but I've never once heard any of them talk about Blu-Ray. They're into Drobos in the studio, multiple portable HDs in the field, cloud storage for long-term stuff, and of course backups at multiple sites. They've already moved past optical backup.

 

[Shane D]

we've already shot over 6,000 images (avg 30mbs per tif) this year and thats just whats been picked and shipped to the separator. When you count in all the multi poses from location shots that number gets even bigger. Anything stored on the network gets backed up along with the corporate nightlies and weeklies.

What i burn to dvd is just the picks thats been put into our database because those only reside as rgbs on our server in about a 3 month rotation. now all of our cmyk's are stored on another system and never rotate out. But i have had to go back to a original rgb that was shot over a year ago to reprocess and having those on dvds in the rack in the old film storage room is a massive time saver, and tons cheaper than just adding more and more space to the san. I just looked and i have 400 back up cds and 243 dvds and all those are replicated at the off site too. Thats just from the about the last 7 years.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Craig,
Will these BD burners work with a Mac?
As for playback purposes do the graphic cards in the Mac Pro
and iMacs support BD playback?

 

[Ted Todorov]

Craig,
Will these BD burners work with a Mac?
As for playback purposes do the graphic cards in the Mac Pro
and iMacs support BD playback?

Not Craig, but the answers are yes and no respectively. Toast will let you burn BDs using third party burners (don't know if Roxio lists which models it supports, might want to check their website before buying).
However there is no current way to playback *commercial* BDs in Mac OS X.

 

[Sam Posten]

Yes the new MacPro video cards support HDCP and you can put a 3rd Party Blu ray Burner in a mac pro for as cheap as $200. Toast Titanium supports burning your own BluRay deck playable disks as do several other manufacturers but there is no software on the mac platform that will allow you to play back a BluRay ROM at all. Even OSX Leopard itself has most of the pieces but they are not all together yet to do so.

 

[Craig S]

Ron, Other World Computing (macsales.com) has a whole page of Blu-Ray drives, both internal and external. They all should work with a Mac.
But yeah, no commercial BD playback on the Mac as yet, because they haven't licensed the technology. This was what Jobs was referring to with his "bag of hurt" comment last year.

 

[Ted Todorov]

But yeah, no commercial BD playback on the Mac as yet, because they haven't licensed the technology. This was what Jobs was referring to with his "bag of hurt" comment last year.

I tend to interpret the bag of hurt as the required, deep in the OS "secure path" HDCP nonsense, not the cost of licensing. I always thought that at least some of Vista's performance issues stemmed from having built in BD HDCP, and Apple wants no part of that -- now or ever. Please correct me if I don't have my facts straight.

 

[Sam Posten]

The HDCP path through the OS is already implemented, as evidenced by the guys who had trouble with the new Macbooks to an external device that is not HDCP protected like the 24" LED display:
Faster Forward - Apple's DRM Breaks MacBook Movie-Download Viewing
Apple brings HDCP to a new aluminum MacBook near you - Ars Technica

 

[Ted Todorov]

The HDCP path through the OS is already implemented, as evidenced by the guys who had trouble with the new Macbooks to an external device that is not HDCP protected like the 24" LED display:
Faster Forward - Apple's DRM Breaks MacBook Movie-Download Viewing
Apple brings HDCP to a new aluminum MacBook near you - Ars Technica

Yes, all Display Port equipped Macs support HDCP (which means all new Macs), and the iTunes HD downloads are definitely HDCP encoded. But all you sure this is the same as the end to end "secure path" demanded by the Blu-ray crowd?

 

[Sam Posten]

Yes, by definition.
High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
You may be confusing it with TCP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing
To my knowledge BluRay is not a TCP platform but I have not researched it. TCP is worse than DRM, in it your computer conspires against your freedoms. And yes, unfortunately I do own several computers that adhere to it (Win 7)... I hope this dies before DRM does.

 

[JJR512]

Steve Jobs' job is to make sure Apple's customers get what they want, not what he (Jobs) thinks they should have. Like most politicians, Jobs seems to forget this. There seems to be a not-insignificant group of people that want Blu-Ray on Macintosh.

I do not believe that this is too difficult for Apple. They pressured the music industry into allowing lower prices, allowing no DRM, etc. And Apple is on the Board of Directors for Blu-Ray Disc Association, the organization from which Jobs says it is too difficult or expensive to license Blu-Ray. Are we to believe that despite all Jobs has been able to accomplish for Apple, he can't get an organization for which he is on their Executive Board to make it easy for Apple to adopt that organization's technology? Is that Jobs' fault or Blu-Ray's? There seems to be some rather large disconnects going on here. It seems like Apple should want Blu-Ray, and it seems like it should be easy for Apple to get Blu-Ray. Yet Jobs says it won't happen. I just don't get it.