Universal bringing BD-Live integration to the iPhone, irony to starving children

Although Apple still hasn't managed to achieve feature parity with any of its competitors by enabling Blu-ray playback in OS X, it looks like Universal's bringing the mountain to the Mac -- or at least the iPhone. At first, the upcoming special edition of Fast and Furious will feature integration with a special iPhone / iPod touch app that'll allow viewers to control 360-degree models of the cars in the "Virtual Car Garage," but later Universal releases will feature the ability to control movie playback, read annotations while watching your flick, and even download ancillary video content for later playback on the go. Sounds like pretty nifty stuff -- let's hope El Steve reconsiders his whole "bag of hurt" stance when he gets the demo.

[Via AppleInsider]

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 20th 2009 2:56PM]

blu-ray is now over six years old which is "too new" for Apple, they'd prefer to sell their back catalog of compact disc players before embracing such new technologies like this.

they might be close though: http://www.google.com/search?q=blu-ray+apple

[magallanes Posted Jul 20th 2009 3:29PM]

the bag of hurt will force to put drm in several part of the system, not just in a single video player but in the display driver, in the driver model, in the file manager and in the kernel.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 20th 2009 6:53PM]

what Apple calls a bag of hurt is more of a sack of whine, thing is their customers are waiting and have been quite patient, 'till now.

they need to catch up and bring their product line up to date, they need to ship with blu-ray instead of the outdated drives they currently sell.

[Ethan Posted Jul 21st 2009 7:27PM]

Sounds pretty hurtful to me. Of course, itunes video isn't exactly open either, but at least it won't disable outputs on your computer if it thinks you're doing something funny.

[looselycoupled Posted Jul 22nd 2009 3:34PM]

It has nothing to do with capability, as obviously Apple has some of the best software engineers in the world, as does Microsoft, IBM, Sun, RedHat, etc. I want Blu-ray playback without booting into Windows, but I'm not sure I want OSX's display subsystem covered in DRM.

Also, one thing to think about is that the new Intel Nehalem quad-core "clarksfield/lynnfield" and dual-core "clarksdale/arandale" have new virtualization instructions that allow a VM to natively connect to a HARDWARE device. Besides allowing a VM to directly utilize a GPU for games, it perhaps might allow Blu-ray playback in OSX via a windows VM in VMware or parallels that uses the GPU for decoding and can get a bitsream from the BD-rom. Of course you have to buy a 3rd party BD-rom drive, but that is no biggie.

[KeegdnaB Posted Jul 20th 2009 2:11PM]

Where's the love for Blackberry and all the other smartphones that aren't toys....oh wait, they're not marketable the way Apple says their's is.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 20th 2009 2:40PM]

Okay I get that some of the older Profile 1.0 players miss out on the BD-live content, but now you need a specific phone to view content too? Sorry but this is a bit idiotic.
And why the favouritism to the iPhone? not everyone has an iPhone, but alot of folks have Java enabled phones, so why not a Java app?

[Ethan Posted Jul 20th 2009 2:54PM]

Sounds like about the right calibre of entertainment to go with the movie.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 20th 2009 2:59PM]

o, om

[Hydra Posted Jul 20th 2009 6:28PM]

I don't understand the stance apple is taking with blu ray, I can download a 1080p .mkv file and play it just fine with vlc. I see no problems

[shukero Posted Jul 20th 2009 8:09PM]

*SIGH* why do all good things get developed with an iPhone.... crappiest device ever. How about some palm pre or some microsoft "pink" stuff eh?