“Watching a Blu-ray movie in all its high-definition glory on your laptop may finally become an affordable prospect this year. Just don’t wander too far from a power outlet,” Bryan Gardiner reports for Wired.
“With the Sony-backed HD format emerging victorious from a two-year showdown with Toshiba’s HD DVD, many laptop manufacturers are now scrambling to add Blu-ray drives in their desktop and notebook lineups,” Gardiner reports.
“If the first generation of Blu-ray equipped laptops are any indication, you might not get more than halfway through that movie before running out of juice completely, analysts say,” Gardiner reports. “‘Blu-ray battery life is obviously a huge concern,’ says Yankee Group analyst Josh Martin.”
“For now, the laptop manufacturers that have offered Blu-ray drives have also avoided revealing the precise effects of Blu-ray playback on battery life. That’s probably for a very good reason, as some claim battery life can top out at one hour in some cases,” Gardiner reports.
“‘The laser that runs the show [in Blu-ray players] is a very high-power laser,’ notes Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron. That laser is one of the main things that conspire to raise power consumption,” Gardiner reports. “The other part of the equation has to do with the process of decoding data from a Blu-ray disc and turning it into moving images on your screen. When Blu-ray was first introduced, this process was all done in software, which is very taxing on the CPU, eating up processing cycles and power… The solution has come by offloading some of the decode process onto other system hardware.”
More in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “MacVicta” for the heads up.]
Sure after HD is dead, now come the problems. Almost like politics.
surely the next revision of the iMac must be due soon and include blu-ray drive. No power issues and even Dull have got them out the door already. Here’s hoping necxt week SJ will announce iMac BD.
You know, I have one simple request.
And that is to have sharks with frickin’ Blu-Rays attached to their heads.
Why does my cursor disappear in Safari when I go into the upper left corner to select my bookmarks or do anything else up in that area?
Anyone else?
Apple?
And this one time, at Useless Tool Camp . . .
I killed an Ampar.
“Why does my cursor disappear in Safari when I go into the upper left corner to select my bookmarks or do anything else up in that area?”
It often has something to do with those pesky advertisements that change your cursor from the Mac cursor to a cursor within the advertisement. For some reason, sometimes they act on the cursor outside the area that the advertisement is contained. Don’t ask me why, but this is my theory on why it happens…
–mAc
Pat called these “problems,” but it’s just a fact. Maybe a hybrid drive has/would have both kinds of lasers. And maybe it would use regular power on non-Blue Ray discs. Maybe Apple – just hypothesizing here – maybe they could design a slightly thicker MacBook (considering the Air is going the other way – thinner) and re-introduce the old swappable drive modules like the PowerBook 3400c had back in the day. You could pull out the optical battery and swap for a hard drive – or a second battery… Anyway, why not have a standard DVD/-R/RW and optionally swap for a Blue Ray when needed or something? I don’t know. These are just questions I need to consider before embracing panic or disdain.
Blu-ray, schmoo-ray. I’m happily watching HD on my Macbook Air already, courtesy of HDHomerun, EyeTv and the Ethernet dongle…
No CD/DVD drive = a true vision of the future
Ethernet = needs a smaller connector.
mAc-Warrior
So… Your theory…. to paraphrase Miss Anne Elk: “… this is what it is – my theory that I have, that is to say, which is mine, is mine”
And now for something completely different…
Well, this doesn’t explain why Apple hasn’t added Blu-Ray to the iMac and MacPro. No battery problem with these computers.
The other shoe to drop is the very high cost of the drive.
“Why does my cursor disappear in Safari when I go into the upper left corner to select my bookmarks or do anything else up in that area?”
I used to see that but it’s been a while. Maybe it quit with 10.5.1 or 10.5.2, or maybe when I started using Safari’s WebKit nightly builds (but I think it quit long before that).
You should try WebKit. It’s damn fast. http://www.webkit.org
Restart your computer, repair permissions…
“The Mobile GM45/47 chipsets are an integral part of Montevina and will feature the new GMA X4500HD graphics core. The X4500HD will add full hardware H.264 decode acceleration, so Apple could begin shipping MacBook Pros with Blu-ray drives after the Montevina upgrade without them being a futile addition. With full hardware H.264 decode acceleration your CPU would be somewhere in the 0 – 10% range of utilization while watching a high definition movie, allowing you to watch a 1080p movie while on battery power. The new graphics core will also add integrated HDMI and DisplayPort support.”
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3246&p=2
Blu-ray battery life is obviously a huge concern
But I thought Blu-ray was superior. Where was this concern before HD-DVD died?
I agree with Pat, this IS like politics. Promise a better way, then be no different than the guy you just beat.
Maybe Apple can fast-forward the bandwidth and wi-fi things, making Blu-ray a non-issue.
But I thought Optical Disk market was dead in a few. Why Blu-Ray now SJ?
Suck on that, Mac nerds..
Yep, WebKit is fast. There are few bugs, but it’s FAST!
There was no HD disk debate, because it was up in the air until a few weeks ago. Now that Blu-ray wins, the question arises.
As for the headline… there’s NO WAY the MacBook (or an iMac or mini) would get a Blu-ray drive. Maybe we’ll see them offered for Pro machines, but not too soon, though.
Suck on THIS, MAC dorks.
Modern graphics chips handle H.264 so there’s no CPU load, but the laser is another issue. Let’s just hope that those nano technology lithium ion batteries start rolling out of the production line straight in to MacBooks.
@ Fric Frac
Mine too, on a MDD Wind Tunnel Twin, 10.4.11. . . . It’s not consistent, on mine.
You have my permission to repair the face of the next guru who offers that “old chestnut” solution.
Hi Reality Check,
1/ I don’t know what repairing permissions does but in Tiger it solved a host of problems and rejuvenated the system for a time.
2/ I haven’t tried it with Leopard because it would hang for hours. That might be fixed now?
3/ Are you the same Reality Check who I see at a certain political blog in the Caribbean?
why does anyone need a BR drive on a laptop? Give me a break no one needs BR HD on a 15″ computer screen. If you need a disc to store 50gb of data then this is a niche product for a handful of pros.
I’d rather have a better screen first on my macbook.
This will be limited to the pro line for professional photogs.
How many people even use their DVD burning capabilities on notebooks.
BiZarRo,
you’re exactly right. Watching a movie on your laptop in this format is absolutely unnecessary. One doesn’t need this format unless you have a very large TV. Otherwise regular DVD does just fine.
Blueray on a laptop would only be needed for very large data files. And again very large data files.
They’ll put the drives in there, just to sell the machines to the masses, who are duped into thinking this is something they really need.
Wanna watch a movie. Download it and watch it later.
Hey, there was no magic word? (At first. Now there is.)
Ampar, what do you pay those people for ? Honestly ?
LOL. Do the people who recommend repairing permissions for every software fault in existence actually know what this does? Do they have the most basic understanding of UNIX file systems?
It’s the modern equivalent of zapping the PRAM and rebuilding the desktop.
Although in the past, repairing permissions has cured strange/erratic problems. Blame it more in confused software than UNIX?
I do not know what the big deal is about blu-ray. I still think it makes much more sense to have the files on the hard drive and access them from there. I think all media will eventually go towards downloadable or streamed content.
@ Bill,
Amen, brother. I’m not going to touch Blu-Ray anything. I say just get rid of the idea of driving to a store to pick up a computer file on a disc all together.
The more people download the files, the more content will become available. Then more pressure will be but on the service providers to speed things up.
That’s going to happen regardless, but the sooner the better.