December 18, 2008

Blu-Ray's "bag of hurt"

Karl Soule of Adobe explains one reason why Blu-Ray replication cannot be done today from an Encore disc or disc image -- a $3500 licensing fee for the 1st title and $1500 thereafter. See What's Wrong with the Blu-Ray Market Today? Part 1: Duplication vs. Replication, and AACS.

The good news is that Encore work can be duplicated in mass "onto store-bought burnable BD-ROM media... and the content will still play in most (but not all) Blu-Ray players."

Update: Final Cut User has some additional observations and a State of the Technology overview of Blu-Ray.

Update (01/09): The NYT looks at CES and Blu-ray’s Fuzzy Future.

And on the FCP-L, Philip Hodgetts explains a bit more:

"I'd say it's not going to happen on OS X - playback or authoring - because the entire internal OS has to have encrypted memory paths throughout the computer. None of this is in OS X and none is (apparently) planned for Snow Leopard. This internal encrypted memory path is reportedly one of the reasons that Vista's performance was significantly slower than XP. It's not so much stubborness on the part of Job but rather a disinclination to 'pollute' the elegance of OS X.
... [and] if Blu-ray won the disc war, then downloads would succeed!"

Update (1/20/2009): CrunchGear gives Nine (questionable) reasons why Blu-ray will succeed.

No comments: