Amex Digital does what Steve wouldn't, intros portable Blu-ray burner for Macs
By Darren Murph 
posted Oct 16th 2008 7:02PM
posted Oct 16th 2008 7:02PM
[Thanks, A1]
posted Oct 16th 2008 7:02PM
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Can this drive play blu-ray discs on a MAC running OS X? That has not been possible before as OS X does not support blu-ray.
No. Just data discs.
Why is this labeled just for the Mac? The web site says, in its requirements, "Operating System: Windows XP & Vista and Mac OSX"
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if any generic BD burner is capable of working under Mac OS X. Job's comments had nothing to do with burning discs, as can be seen by looking at them in context. They were to do with content, with watching Blu-ray movies on Macs. That's why Philip Schiller added "We have the best HD movie and TV options in iTunes." afterwards.
This is yet another DM "Someone said something bad about Blu-ray so I'm going to pretend they did something stupid" article. The only surprise is that he didn't blame Toshiba.
Actually, it's more of another "Steve Jobs is a fascist who wants to control everything on a mac and make money off of any media that you see on a mac and mac users are stupid enough to take whatever he'll let them download and not demand better"
Anybody wanna talk about that? :)
hmmm... the title on the webpage says $269. Price cut already?
If you can watch Blu-ray movies on Linux, you can watch them on Mac OS X, you just need to install VLC, be able to read UDF 2.5, and have the right keys.
Jobs was making a (very valid) point that there is no one-stop-shopping for Blu-ray licenses like there is with DVD, making it (1) expensive and (2) difficult to license the technology.
That still won't work with the movies with BD+.
One small problem. If Apple bundles VLC with Mac OS X together with a KEYDB.cfg file they regularly update, then Steve Jobs is looking at about four years in prison for violating the circumvention provisions of the DMCA. And with his health being what it is, I'm not sure he'd survive it.
if i can't watch movies, even with buying my own blu-ray drive to add onto my mac, what a waste.
apple is not only not enabling blu-ray playback but they are prohibiting it. just fraking horrible!!!!!
Nice looking drive. Good price. Light on specs though. Pricier burners run at 8x single and 4x dual layer. Emphasis in pricier.
Here's the real question...
If Blu-ray is a bag of hurt... Then what kind of bag is AppleTV???
-Pie
What a silly article. Jobs' complaint about blu-ray was about the supposed licensing issues not about being unable to deliver the hardware. There have been mac blu-ray drives and PC blu-ray laptops for some time now. There is nothing special about this drive. There is no blu-ray playback software for the Mac so I'm not sure what "ability to watch and burn Blu-ray Discs" means. Do some fact checking.
Of course we all know the reason for Apple's procrastinating on blu-ray is that they see iTunes/AppleTV as a direct competitor to it.
OMG you are soooooooo full of shit!
Oh, wait, you agreed with me. Nevermind.
-Pie
I don't understand why anyone would want one of these anyway, whats the point of HD movies on a friggin laptop or computer, there's no benefit, and there are better alternatives for data storage, so why bother??
Gus, go look up what an HTPC and you will see why someone might want "HD movies on a friggin laptop or computer".
I'm not sure it's right to suggest nobody wants (HD) movies on a laptop or computer, but yeah the question is does anyone really want disc-based movies on such a device? The trend right now is to rip optical discs out of newer laptop designs in order to make them smaller and lighter. And then there's HTPCs which are entirely oriented towards locally cached copies and networked libraries of media.
In that respect, Apple already has a solution in place, it's just a shame it's rental based.
There isn't one stop shopping when licensing content for iTunes either, not just in the US but every country it operates. In fact it would take an army of lawyers to sort out all the contract wrangling..Jobs is spouting BS especially when Apple is on the board of the BDA. It would be more honest for him to say Blu Ray competes with iTunes so therefore he's trying to marginalise it.
In order to get a license to play back Blu-ray content, you need to comply with terms and conditions that are considerably more complex and difficult than Apple has thus far implemented for iTS content. In particular, you have to implement secure path, and that needs architectural changes and hardware requirements that are not exactly trivial and break the "just works" concept Apple is famous for. Apple might be able to get Blu-ray to work with AppleTV - an entirely closed platform - but Apple would certainly have problems pushing out an operating system update for its generic computers to support Blu-ray without breaking things as badly as Microsoft did from XP to Vista.
To pretend Jobs was talking about the ability to get licenses for an entirely new product Apple doesn't sell today is being astonishingly ignorant.
If Apple just wanted to push iTS, it wouldn't be on the board of the BDA in the first place. It clearly wants influence over that standard and make it into something their own computers can support. But thus far they're having no luck.
I think Apple backed the wrong standard myself. HD DVD may have had the secure path crap too, but it at least allowed for an opening in terms of integrating with online download systems and implementing in a way that could have become workable mandatory managed copy. But they backed the standard with the more extreme DRM requirements, and now they're lumped with something where they can't get the licenses they need to implement Blu-ray playback, and will not be able to unless they make the difficult decision to modify their operating system in ways I am quite sure they really do not want to do.
Come off it. Roxio / Sonic, Nero, Corel, Cyberlink are a fraction the size of Apple yet have managed recording / playback software. There really is no excuse for Apple to claim they cannot do it. Especially as they control the hardware and operating system software on their platform. Any issues of creating a "secure path", or not are of their own making and could have been resolved anytime in the last 4 years.
Sorry DrXym, which of Roxio/Sonic, Nero, Corel, or Cyberlink are producing Blu-ray players for Mac OS X? Or are you claiming that these companies actually make open-architecture operating systems, and have modified them to support secure path?
The only company I'm aware of that's produced a secure-path enabled operating system for general purpose use, and therefore produced a platform capable of playing Blu-ray movies while running third party software, is Microsoft. I don't think any of the companies you mention even write operating systems, let alone implement secure path on them.
> Any issues of creating a "secure path", or not are of their own making and could have been resolved anytime in the last 4 years.
Do you even read the words that you type? Do you have any idea what secure path entails and what the consequences are of implementing it? At this moment, there are a great many people saying Microsoft should rip all this crap out of Windows for Windows 7. And you want Apple to add it to Mac OS X?
AppleTV conforms to all of this stuff, as it is required for even VOD (big studio) movies. And AppleTV is Darwin-based. So I have to think Apple has done this on Darwin (Mac OS X). It just needs to be expanded to more hardware platforms.
Whynot - nope, AppleTV doesn't do any of this. The same VOD that AppleTV implements is also implemented on generic iTunes. Hollywood, for whatever reason, has thus far not required secure path for the iTS.
If the profit margin isn't at least 80%, then it's too painful for Apple to think about.
Misleading price point, the $289 is for reader only, the burner version will set you back $389
Kinda surprised noone else has said it, but the only real reason I'd buy a BR burner right now is for backups.
I've got a Time Capsule and I rsync info to a linux box with tons of disk on it fairly regularly (I follow the many copies across boxes backup strategy) but having BR capacities for backing up some things (like itunes) for off-site backups or something would be nice. Right now I periodically use an external FW HDD and keep that in my desk at work as my off-site backup strategy.
Currently shipping Sony Vaios come with Blu-Ray read/write drives and software to play HD BluRay movies. My MacBook Pro has a 1920 x 1200 screen, perfectly HD capable and in fact normal DVD movies look fuzzy as they must be upscaled from their low resolutions to fit on the MacBook screen. An HD movie player is needed for the Mac and it isn't iTunes. There is zero 1080p content available through iTunes. So PCs running Windows can do what Macs cannot: play HD Blu-Ray movies. Until now.
The press release for this Blu-Ray player states that VLC running on OSX can play Blu-Ray movies in HD on a MacBook Pro. They also state that the best software player for Blu-Ray movies is PowerDVD which runs on Windows. If VLC is problematic, then I'll be dual booting into Windows XP for a 2nd reason: to watch Blu-Ray HD movies. Reason one is to play games.