Apple's DVD Player HD ready?

The other night I connected my MacBook Pro to my HDTV and decided to watch a DVD. I went in to explore the preferences and I noticed something that I don't ever remember seeing before: HD settings. I went back to my older Mac and sure enough, the setting, weren't there. We haven't been given reason to believe that the new Mac's are HDCP ready or if they will support Blu-Ray anytime soon, but it appears that the software is ready when they are.

Is this the first computer software to show any signs of Blu-Ray support, other than a press release? 

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 3rd 2006 8:55AM]

Apple's had high-def support for DVDs for quite a long time actually. The latest version of DVD studio pro, while not supporting HD-DVD and Blu-Ray themselves, DOES support compressing your HD video to a standard DVD using h.264. The idea here is that if a studeo wants to preview things like shows and footage in-house, its a lot easier just to burn a DVD and hand it to someone, who can put it in their Powerbook/MacBook/Powermac.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 3rd 2006 9:33AM]

10.4's DVD player has always had that preference pane. It's for making "HD-DVDs" in DVD Studio Pro 4. They're not real HD-DVDs, they're regular discs with your HD videos encoded in h.264, and apparently only playable in Macs running 10.4. Possibly anything else that can play h.264 videos as well, so maybe some PCs.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 3rd 2006 9:35AM]

It's not the actual 'HD-DVD' or Blu-Ray standard. Kind of like the Divx discs that you can make and some DVD players support.

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 3rd 2006 1:03PM]

This year will really be "the year of HD". Apple has poised itself to be the first company to offer HD movies for sale, and they'll do it via the iTunes Music Store. Read what I think here:

http://www.humanbeingcurious.com/page15/page20/page20.html

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 3rd 2006 1:38PM]

HD discs made with DVD Studio Pro 4 are actually compatible with HD-DVD standard, but ordinary DVD media have very limited HD capacity, about one hour per media or more (8Mbps H.264).

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 3rd 2006 1:51PM]

The big wildcard here is HDCP. It does seem that ATI does not have any cards shipping with HDCP support.

There has been a lot written about Blue Ray/HD DVD support for Vista and XP, and how HDCP is going to be required to play back these formats in full resolution. I suspect that even with a Laptop this will be the case.

As for Blue Ray/HD DVD support for OSX, who knows, but knowing that Steve wants to keep the media compainies happy, I doubt playback will be any less restrictive then in Windows

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 3rd 2006 2:35PM]

Judge,
I hear what you are saying buy my Mini also runs 10.4 and it doesn't have that pane, that is the first thing I checked.

Also it mentions hybrid disks and as we all know "DVD Player" will only play VIDEO_TS folders so I am not sure I follow your logic.

Other than Blu-Ray and HD-DVD what other types of disk are "hybrid disks"?

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 3rd 2006 5:40PM]

HD playback is a standard feature in DVD Player 4.6 (Tiger). http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dvdplayer/

[(Unverified) Posted Mar 5th 2006 3:43PM]

I looked at it today, and the HD tab appeared... so if you have an apple HD monitor( i have the 30") it will also show up..