The first Blu-ray (BD) disc drive for desktop PCs is here, but be warned — it won’t play commercial BD movies.
Sony officially announced its BWU-100A product at its “Experience More 2006″ event in Sydney yesterday, all the while acknowledging that there’s significant room for improvement before the product is viable for integration into media centre PCs.
Vincent Bautista, Sony’s product manager for data storage, told CNET.com.au that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format.
Bautista says that one of two reasons for this is the fact that commercial content is encrypted with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), which can only be decrypted using a HDCP-compliant graphics card that offers DVI or HDMI connections. Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that support HDCP, this isn’t yet possible.
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That is like selling someone a car and not telling them it has no engine! What the hell are they gonna want a Blue ray or HD-DVD player for if it will not do what it is supposed to do?
I guess they really think they can make a killing on it just because it says “blue ray”? I think they are about to wake up to reality when people find out it will not do what it was made for.
I wonder how many returns this is gonna generate once the word gets out they are useless?
Ohh alright well I’m sticking with DVD for now anyway:P
Andrew110 You need HDCP for HD-DVD too so either format working in a computer for watching movies is a no go for now.
wow. and their stupidity just reached a new low.
I’m not too sure about blu-ray….
no reason to even waste money on it then