First Blue-ray Drive For PC Will Not Play Movies

Shawn Andrich

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Aug 4, 2006
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First Blue-ray Drive For PC Will Not Play Movies

Sony officially announced their BWU-100A Blue-ray drive for desktop PC's yesterday, acknowledging that they will not play commercial Blue-ray movies.

Yesterday at the "Experience More 2006" event in Sydney, Sony announced [http://www.cnet.com.au/desktops/dvdburners/0,39029405,40091720,00.htm]the first Blue-ray player for desktop PC's will not allow playback of retail Blue-ray movies due to the High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) encryption on the discs. There are currently no HDCP-compliant video cards on the market that can decrypt the code. Even if there were, there is no playback software available to purchase that can decrypt HDCP either.

Sony is hopeful that they will resolve the issues soon and reminds Austrailians looking to spend roughly $1,072 US dollars on the unit that it's still good for backup and storage. End users will also be able to create and distribute their own (non-encrypted) Blue-ray movies.

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Bongo Bill

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I think there's a point at which you can be too concerned about preventing piracy, and I think Sony has long since passed that point.
 

Bongo Bill

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Also: I think it's funny that the copy protection in this device prevents the viewing of legitimate movies, but can still be used for pirated ones.
 

Lex Darko

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I'm starting to think someone has put something in the water at sony's headquaters.

It's just one announcement of bad news after the another.

The $600 price tag of the PS3, the failure of UMDs as a new form of media, the bad ad campaign of the PSP white and now a blue ray player that can play blue ray disc.

What's next? An announcement that the PS3 is going to be pushed back to 2007?
 

Shawn Andrich

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thewanderer14 said:
Shawn, on a daily basis I have verbal arguments with people who want to make photographic copies of pictures from magazines, posters, the internet, and professionally taken portraits. An idea for an Escapist article would be an in depth look at copyrights and where they came from, i.e. 1978 laws passed in the U.S. to protect Mickey Mouse, and how they have changed the world. I'd love to volunteer to write it, but it'd be too photography-laden for your purposes. And I'd prolly get fired. Then I'd be a gamer w/out a job.
I've found that some of my best ideas ever would be better done by someone else, you're in good company my friend. ;)
 

Bongo Bill

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Lex Darko said:
I'm starting to think someone has put something in the water at sony's headquaters.

It's just one announcement of bad news after the another.

The $600 price tag of the PS3, the failure of UMDs as a new form of media, the bad ad campaign of the PSP white and now a blue ray player that can play blue ray disc.

What's next? An announcement that the PS3 is going to be pushed back to 2007?
It's not insanity so much as infighting. The movies division doesn't like it when the electronics division makes something that can be used for piracy, marketing has the games division stuck trying to preserve a "gamer" brand in the face of a market that is increasingly being driven to less intensive styles, and in the mean time, nobody's in a good mood 'cause if it weren't for Spider-Man 2 they'd be hemorrhaging money at a pace that has driven men to suicide. This is, of course, an oversimplification of the issue, but basically Sony's got its eggs in too many baskets, and some of the baskets conflict with or are parasitic on other baskets that also have Sony eggs in them.