Sony has officially announced its BWU100A Blu-ray disc writer in Sydney at the Experience More 2006 event just a few days ago, which is due for launch later this month for AU$1399 (~US$750). This writer will feature 2x writing support, but Sony's product manager for data storage, Vincent Bautista has confirmed that it will lack one very significant feature - the ability to play commercial Blu-ray disc movies.
While the drive would be more than capable of reading Blu-ray discs for the playback of HD video content, the problem is due to the main issue that plagues all next generation formats for movies: The Infamous Copy protection. With the lack of PCs available that have HDCP enabled graphics cards and playback software still in its development, Sony has decided to leave out support for commercial BD movies altogether. However, the drive will still be able to play back user-created HD content, such as from a high definition camcorder, where no copy protection is required.
At this time, Sony's VAIO VGN-AR18GP laptop computer along with Intervideo's OEM WinDVD BD edition seems to be the only solution available for playing back commercial Blu-ray movies on a computer. It features a HDCP enabled HDMI output for connecting up to a HD ready TV. While Bautista expects these issues to be resolved in the near future for later drives, he mentions that this drive will still be useful as a storage device, such as for personal HD recordings. Thanks to andjelkoyu for letting us know about this news:
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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. The second reason, according to Bautista, is that BD playback software that can decrypt HDCP isn't "released as a saleable item yet". |
Unless the copy protection measures are carried out at a hardware level in the Blu-ray drive, I cannot see why they could not develop the drive in a way such that it could be upgraded with a firmware update to offer copy protected Blu-ray disc playback once HDCP enabled graphics cards and playback software become available. For now, this would not be a good time to go for this drive unless the consumer has no intention of ever playback Blu-ray movies on their PC.
Even still, Blu-ray is by no means a cost effective storage medium either at this present time of writing. The price of a single BD-R disc can easily pay for a spindle of 50 DVD+R discs and the price of a USB 250GB hard drive is cheaper than 10 BD-RE blanks, never mind requiring nothing more than a spare USB port on a PC to read back. :p
andjelkoyu added: So, this is the possible reason why this drive is substantially cheaper than similar products, but they may be affected with this issue as well.
Source: c|net News - Reviews
