Some insight for AI, BD drives = Insane Markup, just thought you all should know it is technological cost, but the markup is also crazy. Price is not an item in my opinion in Apple's decision.
Lets also not forget that most people still use a standard def. CRT TV... the HD revolution is more slow evolution. CD rom drives first appeared in the 80s, but they didn't start taking off till the 90s. Give it time folks..
LOL, and I'm sure not one of them own a Mac (jking). While I understand standard def. CRT TV's are by far dominant in existence, they are at this point obsolete. I personally know no-one under the age of 40 that does not own at least one HD TV.
Still any disc technology is yesterdays, it doesn't matter in five years no-one will be buying either, it reminds me of when all the talk was of how MD's were going to be the next step in music storage, just before the iPod took over the music industry and we learned we didnt need any disc storage (for music).
CRT TV's are by far dominant in existence, they are at this point obsolete.
Labeling a tech "obsolete" just because it's not the newest technology available is a pet peeve of mind. CRT TVs are still being sold, their installed base holds the majority, and they use the same digital and analog inputs as plasma and LCD.
Even if Apple offered a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive built-in, their Cinema Displays would be unable to play movie titles do to copy protection, right? You need a display with HDMI/HDCP, not DVI?
Even if Apple offered a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive built-in, their Cinema Displays would be unable to play movie titles do to copy protection, right? You need a display with HDMI/HDCP, not DVI?
For this reason and the others enumerated above, prosumers are in a major holding pattern. But the next sixteen months are likely to bring definitive changes and standards that will hold up for a while — HDMI/HDCP displays, graphic chipsets built into and augmenting the core cpu, an OS that balances DRM with the needs of creative professionals, increasingly common (and simplified) RAID setups, a sorting out of the 15+ Gig optical disc question, and so on. We're on the cusp of it all.
Obviously, some professionals have been making that investment already, with the numerous BR and HDVD titles that are available and selling now. Those discs didn't just make themselves. I'm pretty sure that the cost of the hardware is factored into the job bid. Stuff like that depreciates quickly either way, but that should be factored into the price of doing the work, and thus not really a loss but a gain for being able to take on a lucrative project.
The problem is that Apple likes to pretend that it's professional editing suite is leading-edge but they fail to properly support either leading-edge format. Right now, Apple-using pros don't have any means to tap that growing market because their software won't do proper BR/HDVD authoring, and the hardware options are scant. Contrast this when in Jan 2005, their consumer software can capture and edit HD, but even now, their pro software and hardware doesn't offer recording or distribution capabilities for that captured and edited HD.
The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD you are seeing today is made by DVD duplicators by using DVD pressing -- which is not the same as DVD burning in computers.
At any rate, Apple does not have the software to support HD-DVD or Blu-Ray yet. This may very well come at NAB. If so, you may then see blu-ray or hd-dvd drives in macs. Get my drift?
the 17" and 15" macbook pro are both 1 inch thick so why is it that it is not available for the 15" and the macbook is even thicker,so why is it not available for the macbook
Because in the 17-inch, the optical drive can use all of the vertical inch of space, whereas in the 15 inch, the optical has to sit on top of part of the mobo.
with the new line of imac coming out and knowing how tight apple and sony are, i wont pay a penny for that drive, maybe apple already thought of it you know how they love to be ahead of everyone and now that they have apple tv, i think blu ray will complete the puzzle
A few people have touched on this before, but I think the thing to keep in mind that sticking a Blu-Ray drive into a Mac does not equate to playing next-gen (bought) content- read the page at FastMac, they don't dare to claim that; all this product really is is a fatter DVD-R. I think this makes the report, and the 'lagging behind' tagline, a non-story.
The extreme lengths that both next-gen format consortia have gone to to protect their data when played inside a computer (ie HDCP, High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) mean that having an add-on like this will never allow an upgraded mac to play that content, unless someone cracks the encryption scheme wide open.
To be certified to play HD content, there must be an end-to-end encrypted data path through the machine, even down to the digital connection to the display. As such, it requires a new platform (such as Santa Rosa for notebooks) to even consider it. Sure, Apple could also offer a Blu-Ray burner in their existing lineup, but I think people would be more than a bit miffed that they couldn't offer early adopters the ability to play HD content off it. They are much better off waiting until the tech is more settled before they try to implement it.
Well said.
Just to make it crystal clear: you cannot use this drive in a Mac to play commercial HD content. For two reasons:
1.) The Macs you can put it in don't have (to my knowledge) HDCP
2.) OS X doesn't support VC-1 or H.264 High-Profile.
I seriously doubt there is much of a market for an $800 notebook optical drive at this point. FastMac won't exactly be selling a ton of these, so that's probably why Apple isn't in any hurry to make their own drives available. Once the prices drop and Blu-Ray becomes more mainstream, you'll start seeing them available BTO from Apple.
I agree. I also suspect that most people using MBs or MBPs are perfectly happy, for the moment, to attach an HD device externally. It's a rather small market at the moment, and as you pointed out, the price of admission is very steep, so whomever opts in is going to really need it.
Just to make it crystal clear: you cannot use this drive in a Mac to play commercial HD content. For two reasons:
1.) The Macs you can put it in don't have (to my knowledge) HDCP
2.) OS X doesn't support VC-1 or H.264 High-Profile.
I don't get the point of this drive.
apples $599.00 - $1,799.00 Cinema Display don't have HDCP as well at a time when cheaper ones do what is apple doing to do with pissed off Cinema Display owners who payed a lot and now have to get rip of them?
Why are people so focused on disc formats when downloads and streaming are clearly right around the corner? If you have an AppleTV, watch a movie trailer. It's streaming from the Apple trailer site and it looks great (and obviously could be improved a little). How hard would it be for Apple to charge $10-20 a month and offer a streaming rental service? Really easy.
I agree that the service is fast and good. I don't think the previews are HD though (I may be wrong). Apple's main challenges with this include
1) Finding a way of handling the immense bandwidth on their servers (perhaps a peer-to-peer file sharing method!)
2) Finding a way of making it easier for ISPs to handle the immense bandwidth (peer-to-peer favouring a local network?)
3) A financial model (this may be solved by #1 and #2). A purchasing model saves Apple bandwidth (users download once only, and pay a premium price) where rental would kill bandwidth. (Apple may be able to partner with individual ISPs to solve this too.)
(btw, though it's usually flawless, I have had 2 hiccups with streaming trailers on a 6Mbps connection, so I'd like the AppleTV to automatically pause if it gets ahead of the streaming and use the TOTAL time so far in its re-estimate of the download time required.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by solipsism
Apple is clearly supporting Blu-ray as they are on the board. As I recall, commercial HD-DVD discs use both H.264 and VC-1 (Microsoft's codec) while Blu-ray only uses the former.
Both BluRay and HD-DVD use h264 (mpeg-4/10), vc-1, and mpeg-2. Further to that, a BluRay or HD-DVD player MUST support all 3 codecs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalclips
My 2 GIG Mac Dual G5 can burn an Hi Def DVD using DVD Pro HD using footage I shot on my Sony FX1 HDV Camera and can play it. I fully appreciate this is not a true HD DVD since it uses a standard DVD disk and only a Mac can play it but it is, sure as heck, true 1920 x 1080i HD output.
That's excellent. Warner Bros pushed a HD-DVD standard to allow HD films on regular DVDs (I think they called it HD-DVD9??). Is this what you're producing or is it unique to Apple?
ie: Will your Apple Hi Def DVD play in a regular HD-DVD player?
Apple doesn't offer the authoring software, so if a Mac is used to edit or encode a video, they'll likely have to hand it off to someone else to do the authoring work.
I see what you are saying, but HD-DVD and Blu-ray are still pretty much bleeding edge. Of the people I know in the post-production world, I don't know of anyone who has a pressing need to use either format.
Apple will probably offer support in these next updates and I'm sure more people will begin to use the formats but for right now its not a big problem.
Quote:
I fully appreciate this is not a true HD DVD since it uses a standard DVD disk and only a Mac can play it but it is, sure as heck, true 1920 x 1080i HD output.
The disk is just a storage medium. It doesn't determine the resolution or quality of the content. Red laser DVD can store HD content, just not very much of it. The only real advantage the blue laser disks have over standard red laser DVD is the fact that they have higher storage density and can store more data. Because of that fact they are marketed as HD.
Labeling a tech "obsolete" just because it's not the newest technology available is a pet peeve of mind. CRT TVs are still being sold, their installed base holds the majority, and they use the same digital and analog inputs as plasma and LCD.
You cut off half my sentence, the CRT part is not what makes it obsolete, the SD part is. SD CRT TV are still available, but for the most part are a small fraction of TV's sold, and are obsolete. HD CRT's are still very popular and by far the cheapest way to get HD, and are not at all obsolete, just heavy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Guartho
I only know three people that own an HDTV. All are well over 40. Only one has any sort of HD content available for their HDTV.
How many have electricity . Why would you have an HDTV and not get HD content, thats a huge waste of money.
Still stick by my statement, I would say I know well over 10 close friends or couples between 30-40 all of whom have at least one HDTV, all with HD content.
I see what you are saying, but HD-DVD and Blu-ray are still pretty much bleeding edge. Of the people I know in the post-production world, I don't know of anyone who has a pressing need to use either format.
That's just of the people that you know. The current Final Cut Studio suite has been used to author consumer DVDs for the major studios, such as Disney's Mary Poppins SE. As many new movies are moving towards day & date DVD & HD releases, those using FCS are going to be losing out on those opportunities. True BRD and HD-DVD support is extremely significant, such that if Apple follows its FCS updage pattern, it will be added to FCS this year or in 2009, and that's too long to wait and too big of a potential market to lose and too big of a potential credibility loss as that would mean that Apple is only pretending that its pro tools are cutting edge.
That may be but for the most part major studios are not really FCS primary market. I guarantee any high end company that maybe using DVDSP is also using a lot of proprietary software and plug ins.
There are whole business devoted to DVD compression. Most of these companies use proprietary DVD compression software and have a compression specialist who will figure out how to get all of the content on the disk with the least amount of artifacts and the best quality picture.
I've been to Technicolor and seen how they make DVD's. This is the type of service most of the studios are using. Technicolor Content Services
I'm not disagreeing with you that Apple should add Blu-ray and HD-DVD support. We should see full support come April 15th. I would be extremely shocked if we didn't. I'm just saying that the majority of people who use FCS have not had a need for it.
You cut off half my sentence, the CRT part is not what makes it obsolete, the SD part is. SD CRT TV are still available, but for the most part are a small fraction of TV's sold, and are obsolete. HD CRT's are still very popular and by far the cheapest way to get HD, and are not at all obsolete, just heavy.
I can't get more than a handful of HD channels from my cable company, yet I have several hundred in SD, but somehow it has obsolesced?
Cable, satellite and terrestrial broadcasters are atill primarily using the NTSC (or PAL) SD single. HD content for many satellite and cable companies is an additional fee, not the default package. Once HD becomes the standard and broadcasters stop supporting NTSC (or PAL) then SD will be obsolete.
As for people who own HD set, I personally know of at least a dozen homes that have HD sets and they all have at least two other SD sets in use. Besides that I can think of many more homes that only have SD sets in use.
I have no doubt that SD and CRT will go the way of the dodo, but that day has not come yet nor will it for many years to come.
When broadcasters stop transmitting in SD, and only then, will it have become obsolete. But that won't happen until the install base of HD sets is greater than SD sets.
Comments
Lets also not forget that most people still use a standard def. CRT TV... the HD revolution is more slow evolution. CD rom drives first appeared in the 80s, but they didn't start taking off till the 90s. Give it time folks..
LOL, and I'm sure not one of them own a Mac (jking). While I understand standard def. CRT TV's are by far dominant in existence, they are at this point obsolete. I personally know no-one under the age of 40 that does not own at least one HD TV.
Still any disc technology is yesterdays, it doesn't matter in five years no-one will be buying either, it reminds me of when all the talk was of how MD's were going to be the next step in music storage, just before the iPod took over the music industry and we learned we didnt need any disc storage (for music).
CRT TV's are by far dominant in existence, they are at this point obsolete.
Labeling a tech "obsolete" just because it's not the newest technology available is a pet peeve of mind. CRT TVs are still being sold, their installed base holds the majority, and they use the same digital and analog inputs as plasma and LCD.
I personally know no-one under the age of 40 that does not own at least one HD TV.
I only know three people that own an HDTV. All are well over 40. Only one has any sort of HD content available for their HDTV.
Even if Apple offered a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD drive built-in, their Cinema Displays would be unable to play movie titles do to copy protection, right? You need a display with HDMI/HDCP, not DVI?
For this reason and the others enumerated above, prosumers are in a major holding pattern. But the next sixteen months are likely to bring definitive changes and standards that will hold up for a while — HDMI/HDCP displays, graphic chipsets built into and augmenting the core cpu, an OS that balances DRM with the needs of creative professionals, increasingly common (and simplified) RAID setups, a sorting out of the 15+ Gig optical disc question, and so on. We're on the cusp of it all.
Obviously, some professionals have been making that investment already, with the numerous BR and HDVD titles that are available and selling now. Those discs didn't just make themselves. I'm pretty sure that the cost of the hardware is factored into the job bid. Stuff like that depreciates quickly either way, but that should be factored into the price of doing the work, and thus not really a loss but a gain for being able to take on a lucrative project.
The problem is that Apple likes to pretend that it's professional editing suite is leading-edge but they fail to properly support either leading-edge format. Right now, Apple-using pros don't have any means to tap that growing market because their software won't do proper BR/HDVD authoring, and the hardware options are scant. Contrast this when in Jan 2005, their consumer software can capture and edit HD, but even now, their pro software and hardware doesn't offer recording or distribution capabilities for that captured and edited HD.
The Blu-Ray and HD-DVD you are seeing today is made by DVD duplicators by using DVD pressing -- which is not the same as DVD burning in computers.
At any rate, Apple does not have the software to support HD-DVD or Blu-Ray yet. This may very well come at NAB. If so, you may then see blu-ray or hd-dvd drives in macs. Get my drift?
Apple likes complete eco-systems.
with the new line of imac coming out and knowing how tight apple and sony are, i wont pay a penny for that drive, maybe apple already thought of it you know how they love to be ahead of everyone and now that they have apple tv, i think blu ray will complete the puzzle
Welcome to AI, idiot!
A few people have touched on this before, but I think the thing to keep in mind that sticking a Blu-Ray drive into a Mac does not equate to playing next-gen (bought) content- read the page at FastMac, they don't dare to claim that; all this product really is is a fatter DVD-R. I think this makes the report, and the 'lagging behind' tagline, a non-story.
The extreme lengths that both next-gen format consortia have gone to to protect their data when played inside a computer (ie HDCP, High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) mean that having an add-on like this will never allow an upgraded mac to play that content, unless someone cracks the encryption scheme wide open.
To be certified to play HD content, there must be an end-to-end encrypted data path through the machine, even down to the digital connection to the display. As such, it requires a new platform (such as Santa Rosa for notebooks) to even consider it. Sure, Apple could also offer a Blu-Ray burner in their existing lineup, but I think people would be more than a bit miffed that they couldn't offer early adopters the ability to play HD content off it. They are much better off waiting until the tech is more settled before they try to implement it.
Well said.
Just to make it crystal clear: you cannot use this drive in a Mac to play commercial HD content. For two reasons:
1.) The Macs you can put it in don't have (to my knowledge) HDCP
2.) OS X doesn't support VC-1 or H.264 High-Profile.
I don't get the point of this drive.
I seriously doubt there is much of a market for an $800 notebook optical drive at this point. FastMac won't exactly be selling a ton of these, so that's probably why Apple isn't in any hurry to make their own drives available. Once the prices drop and Blu-Ray becomes more mainstream, you'll start seeing them available BTO from Apple.
I agree. I also suspect that most people using MBs or MBPs are perfectly happy, for the moment, to attach an HD device externally. It's a rather small market at the moment, and as you pointed out, the price of admission is very steep, so whomever opts in is going to really need it.
Well said.
Just to make it crystal clear: you cannot use this drive in a Mac to play commercial HD content. For two reasons:
1.) The Macs you can put it in don't have (to my knowledge) HDCP
2.) OS X doesn't support VC-1 or H.264 High-Profile.
I don't get the point of this drive.
apples $599.00 - $1,799.00 Cinema Display don't have HDCP as well at a time when cheaper ones do what is apple doing to do with pissed off Cinema Display owners who payed a lot and now have to get rip of them?
Why are people so focused on disc formats when downloads and streaming are clearly right around the corner? If you have an AppleTV, watch a movie trailer. It's streaming from the Apple trailer site and it looks great (and obviously could be improved a little). How hard would it be for Apple to charge $10-20 a month and offer a streaming rental service? Really easy.
I agree that the service is fast and good. I don't think the previews are HD though (I may be wrong). Apple's main challenges with this include
1) Finding a way of handling the immense bandwidth on their servers (perhaps a peer-to-peer file sharing method!)
2) Finding a way of making it easier for ISPs to handle the immense bandwidth (peer-to-peer favouring a local network?)
3) A financial model (this may be solved by #1 and #2). A purchasing model saves Apple bandwidth (users download once only, and pay a premium price) where rental would kill bandwidth. (Apple may be able to partner with individual ISPs to solve this too.)
(btw, though it's usually flawless, I have had 2 hiccups with streaming trailers on a 6Mbps connection, so I'd like the AppleTV to automatically pause if it gets ahead of the streaming and use the TOTAL time so far in its re-estimate of the download time required.)
Apple is clearly supporting Blu-ray as they are on the board. As I recall, commercial HD-DVD discs use both H.264 and VC-1 (Microsoft's codec) while Blu-ray only uses the former.
Both BluRay and HD-DVD use h264 (mpeg-4/10), vc-1, and mpeg-2. Further to that, a BluRay or HD-DVD player MUST support all 3 codecs.
My 2 GIG Mac Dual G5 can burn an Hi Def DVD using DVD Pro HD using footage I shot on my Sony FX1 HDV Camera and can play it. I fully appreciate this is not a true HD DVD since it uses a standard DVD disk and only a Mac can play it but it is, sure as heck, true 1920 x 1080i HD output.
That's excellent. Warner Bros pushed a HD-DVD standard to allow HD films on regular DVDs (I think they called it HD-DVD9??). Is this what you're producing or is it unique to Apple?
ie: Will your Apple Hi Def DVD play in a regular HD-DVD player?
Apple doesn't offer the authoring software, so if a Mac is used to edit or encode a video, they'll likely have to hand it off to someone else to do the authoring work.
I see what you are saying, but HD-DVD and Blu-ray are still pretty much bleeding edge. Of the people I know in the post-production world, I don't know of anyone who has a pressing need to use either format.
Apple will probably offer support in these next updates and I'm sure more people will begin to use the formats but for right now its not a big problem.
I fully appreciate this is not a true HD DVD since it uses a standard DVD disk and only a Mac can play it but it is, sure as heck, true 1920 x 1080i HD output.
The disk is just a storage medium. It doesn't determine the resolution or quality of the content. Red laser DVD can store HD content, just not very much of it. The only real advantage the blue laser disks have over standard red laser DVD is the fact that they have higher storage density and can store more data. Because of that fact they are marketed as HD.
Labeling a tech "obsolete" just because it's not the newest technology available is a pet peeve of mind. CRT TVs are still being sold, their installed base holds the majority, and they use the same digital and analog inputs as plasma and LCD.
You cut off half my sentence, the CRT part is not what makes it obsolete, the SD part is. SD CRT TV are still available, but for the most part are a small fraction of TV's sold, and are obsolete. HD CRT's are still very popular and by far the cheapest way to get HD, and are not at all obsolete, just heavy.
I only know three people that own an HDTV. All are well over 40. Only one has any sort of HD content available for their HDTV.
How many have electricity
Still stick by my statement, I would say I know well over 10 close friends or couples between 30-40 all of whom have at least one HDTV, all with HD content.
I see what you are saying, but HD-DVD and Blu-ray are still pretty much bleeding edge. Of the people I know in the post-production world, I don't know of anyone who has a pressing need to use either format.
That's just of the people that you know. The current Final Cut Studio suite has been used to author consumer DVDs for the major studios, such as Disney's Mary Poppins SE. As many new movies are moving towards day & date DVD & HD releases, those using FCS are going to be losing out on those opportunities. True BRD and HD-DVD support is extremely significant, such that if Apple follows its FCS updage pattern, it will be added to FCS this year or in 2009, and that's too long to wait and too big of a potential market to lose and too big of a potential credibility loss as that would mean that Apple is only pretending that its pro tools are cutting edge.
There are whole business devoted to DVD compression. Most of these companies use proprietary DVD compression software and have a compression specialist who will figure out how to get all of the content on the disk with the least amount of artifacts and the best quality picture.
I've been to Technicolor and seen how they make DVD's. This is the type of service most of the studios are using. Technicolor Content Services
You cut off half my sentence, the CRT part is not what makes it obsolete, the SD part is. SD CRT TV are still available, but for the most part are a small fraction of TV's sold, and are obsolete. HD CRT's are still very popular and by far the cheapest way to get HD, and are not at all obsolete, just heavy.
I can't get more than a handful of HD channels from my cable company, yet I have several hundred in SD, but somehow it has obsolesced?
Cable, satellite and terrestrial broadcasters are atill primarily using the NTSC (or PAL) SD single. HD content for many satellite and cable companies is an additional fee, not the default package. Once HD becomes the standard and broadcasters stop supporting NTSC (or PAL) then SD will be obsolete.
As for people who own HD set, I personally know of at least a dozen homes that have HD sets and they all have at least two other SD sets in use. Besides that I can think of many more homes that only have SD sets in use.
I have no doubt that SD and CRT will go the way of the dodo, but that day has not come yet nor will it for many years to come.
When broadcasters stop transmitting in SD, and only then, will it have become obsolete. But that won't happen until the install base of HD sets is greater than SD sets.