Do you own a Blu-ray player in some form?

[TFM]

In this case they (probably) didn't cut too much. They don't understand the horror of black holes! 

[Targhan]

Take an international flight, they show Interstellar now in airplanes overseas.

. Funny, I take my mother to the airport tomorrow. I'll ask her if the movie was as good as on big screen. .

[TFM]

The movie brings up an interesting idea, but humans _really_ act very stupid! Seriously, I'm just _NOT_ going to a planet so terrible close to the event horizon that time is significantly delayed. I would have totally my pants full. IMHO in reality so close to a black hole (even a tiny one) one probably would be toasted by particles of any size anyway. 

[Carnivius]

Can confirm my laptop does NOT have a blu ray player.  I got my Robin of Sherwood blu ray set yesterday and was watching it fine on my PS4 and then noticed some gorgeous scenes I wanted to screenshot but when I tried to do so on my laptop I noticed it's just a DVD writer in there.  Guh. 

The PS4's own SHARE screenshot function doesn't work on the Blu Ray, presumably cos of copyright reasons or something.   But yeah I still have two Blu Ray players (PS3 and PS4)

[Morn]

I have a cheap Samsung Blu-Ray Player, although I mostly got it for watching YouTube on the telly. It hasn't seen a lot of actual Blu-Rays. 

[Optimus]

My laptop has a BD-Rom that I never managed to use. The laptop came with Vista, at the time I didn't have something to try, didn't bother buying blu-ray movies. Some years later I decided to upgrade to Windows 7. Suddenly there is a new mindcandy BR disc. Wow, finally let's put it in use. But the BD-Rom was locked or something, it could read DVDs but not Blu-Ray. I couldn't make any drivers work at the time. I searched many solutions on the internet, some said "I contacted HP support, they told me I should downgrade back to Vista. What?"


So yeah. Who needs a BD-Rom anyway?

[mr_lou]

My laptop has a BD-Rom that I never managed to use. The laptop came with Vista, at the time I didn't have something to try, didn't bother buying blu-ray movies. Some years later I decided to upgrade to Windows 7. Suddenly there is a new mindcandy BR disc. Wow, finally let's put it in use. But the BD-Rom was locked or something, it could read DVDs but not Blu-Ray. I couldn't make any drivers work at the time. I searched many solutions on the internet, some said "I contacted HP support, they told me I should downgrade back to Vista. What?"


So yeah. Who needs a BD-Rom anyway?

Hmm.... my question would probably be phrased a bit differently, like "Who needs Windoze?" 

As far as I know all you really need to play Blu-ray on a PC is a software media player that supports the format.
Even here in old Ubuntu Linux 12.04 I can play Blu-ray movies from my Blu-ray drive. VLC just doesn't support BD-J menus (yet).
If you get PowerDVD or WinDVD or Home Theater or one of the other players for Windoze that plays Blu-rays, then things really should work fine for you.
Even VLC should play Blu-rays for you from your drive - except it doesn't support BD-J menus yet, and there's a (big) chance the Mindcandy crew used BD-J of course. So maybe that's your problem in that particular case.
(All of 8bit Stories is coded with BD-J (Blu-ray Disc Java) too).

[seanb]

@Optimus  You need either PowerDVD or a region removing software like SlySoft anyDVD.


Welcome to the mess of trying to watch BR's on a computer.
Hey, here's a fancy new BR we've put in your computer but to actually use it you'll have to pay extra.


Well unless you find the software for free 

[mr_lou]

I can understand how a lot of people will expect a Blu-ray software media player to be available on the installed OS when a Blu-ray drive is part of the hardware of a new computer.
And I'd actually agree that the manufacturer should have included one.
But in their defence, Blu-ray can be used for simple things like backup too.

It's a shame how poor decisions of one party gives another party a bad reputation.

[seanb]

The main reason that most people would by a blu ray player would be to watch bluray films I imagine.

I personally blame the bluray association or whatever they're called.
Just like when dvd came out they charged too much to have payback functionality so I imagine hardware makers deliberately allow you to do every thing else but not watch films to avoid these fees.

[mr_lou]

Ah yes, the Blu-ray Disc Association, 170 members or so. One can only be puzzled by how so many people can agree on something that seems so silly.
Although if I try hard, I can see it from their perspective too.

The ridiculous thing about the fees are that they are so high.
For the big companies it's nothing, but the indie software developer can't possible pay that amount.

The fee, however, is only for those who wants to put the Blu-ray logo in their creations and on their products.

For example, my Dune HD Smart D1 plays Blu-rays just fine. I'm using it as a test device for 8bit Stories because I can just copy my JAR to the harddisk and run it, thus saving me money for not having to burn discs.

But there's no Blu-ray logo on this device. Instead they put the Java logo on there. I bet they haven't payed any fees. :-)

But I also have to admit, that among all the players I have tested, the Dune HD Smart D1 is the only one that flickers the screen a bit when running my Xlet. In other words, it does not behave like other players. And this is of course one of those things the Blu-ray Disc Association wants to avoid, because if it had the Blu-ray logo then people would go "Eew, what a crappy format with all of this flickering".

So I understand why they'll want a fee for testing devices to make sure they work as they should. And it makes sense that discs has to go through a test too before they can have the Blu-ray logo on them.
But indie software developers don't have to care about that - which of course is also why VLC and Kodi are getting BD-J playback support now.

[mr_lou]

Double-post. Delete.

[Velktron]

I actually have a Sony Blu-Ray player, which is one of the last models to have a composite video and separate audio RCA outputs. I got it because I wanted to connect it to my old 28" Sony CRT, but it remains useful even with my more modern 32" LCD TV, since it has HDMI. I only own one Blu-Ray movie though. The true reason I got it is because it plays almost all "MP4" files in avi, mkv and mp4 container formats, and even when burned on BD-Rs, which makes for a loooooooooong watching marathon for an inexpensive BD-R disk. Many "DivX/MP4" DVD players have limitations like not supporting h264-encoded MP4s (which rules out youtube downloads    ), and not playing back "HD" content (any resolution >= 720p, and they refuse to play).

Ah and of course I have an external BD-RE unit for my laptop and other computers. A 10-pack of BD-Rs costs 10 Euro...that's 1 Euro for 25 GB! Can't beat that capacity/price ratio...     So I can download a bunch of b-movies straight off Youtube, fill up a cheap BD-R with them to the brim, and watch 20+ hours of movies/shows from a single disk, while having a permanent record. Bliss 

I like having physical media, and with digital, there's no room for sentimentalism, like there's with audio cassettes and LP records: the smaller the size, the more the features, and the larger the capacity and cheaper the medium, the better. In the past I burned DivX movies on CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, and now it's the time for BD-Rs. In the future, I don't know. UV-Ray? Or the death of physical media? I sure hope I won't have to keep all my data in a faraway server I have no control over, or in a single-point-of-failure external hard drive

[mr_lou]

I actually have a Sony Blu-Ray player. I only own one Blu-Ray movie though. The true reason I got it is because it plays almost all "MP4" files in avi, mkv and mp4 container formats.

This is what I mean when I tell people that soon they won't be able to say that they can't play Blu-ray. Because it will inevitable be part of some device or application that you have. Software media players is an obvious example, but gaming consoles and hardware media centers are good examples too.

[seanb]

If you mean blurays will replace dvds as dvds replaced vhs then probably.

Personally I can't wait til optical media for games and films are long dead.

Have some new type of flash based card media that doesn't need moving parts and a laser that'll burn itself out.

[mr_lou]

If you mean blurays will replace dvds as dvds replaced vhs then probably.

Personally I can't wait til optical media for games and films are long dead.

Have some new type of flash based card media that doesn't need moving parts and a laser that'll burn itself out.

I think everyone expects optical media to die soon.
It may not happen as soon as we all think though.

We all know it'll always come down to price. And as Velktron says, you just can't beat 25 gb for 1 euro.
Manufacturers knows that consumers won't buy unless it's the cheapest possible price, so Flash card media don't stand a chance yet.
I expect the new generations of gaming consoles to use the new Ultra HD Blu-ray discs, and therefor these devices will naturally also be able to play Ultra HD Blu-ray movies (and a lot of older formats). You can't escape Blu-ray.

[seanb]

As long as it does die.

[steve]

They should bring back Betamax.

[Bryce]

+1 for Betamax!

I own a traditional (LG) Blu-ray player. I also have Windows Blu-ray player (PowerDVD) and I have a Xtreamer media player, which supposedly also does all the Blu-ray menu stuff, but I've never tried it.

Bryce.

[Optimus]

Hmm.... my question would probably be phrased a bit differently, like "Who needs Windoze?" 

As far as I know all you really need to play Blu-ray on a PC is a software media player that supports the format.
Even here in old Ubuntu Linux 12.04 I can play Blu-ray movies from my Blu-ray drive. VLC just doesn't support BD-J menus (yet).
If you get PowerDVD or WinDVD or Home Theater or one of the other players for Windoze that plays Blu-rays, then things really should work fine for you.
Even VLC should play Blu-rays for you from your drive - except it doesn't support BD-J menus yet, and there's a (big) chance the Mindcandy crew used BD-J of course. So maybe that's your problem in that particular case.
(All of 8bit Stories is coded with BD-J (Blu-ray Disc Java) too).

I don't remember well, but I think it was something like it was hardware locked or something in the laptop. Maybe I am silly and mistaken. I do remember trying to use the DVD players to no avail. I have heard of some laptop locking your hardware or something, not sure. I think it was something like that. I am wondering if it would be recognized in Linux and just work or need special drivers from HP?

[Velktron]

Manufacturers knows that consumers won't buy unless it's the cheapest possible price, so Flash card media don't stand a chance yet.

There are also other considerations, like the decoupling between media and drive and longevity. I personally wouldn't trust a storage device in which the media (platters, flash chips etc.) cannot be separated from the reading mechanisms/electronics, if not in a forensic analysis or data recovery lab. Flash drives and cards, and also HDDs obviously don't offer that. Also, hard disk interfaces eventually became obsolete and controllers may be harder to find, let alone that the quality of HDDs > 512 GB has gone downhill, at least for "consumer grade" drives. In my experience, only data which I had burned to CDs and DVDs (and even written to 1.44MB floppies    ) survived longer than 10 years, and outlived many HDD crashes and computer changes.


Also, when Flash media will be 1 Eur/25 GB too, optical media will probably have advanced to something like 1 Eur/1 TB. 

If you mean blurays will replace dvds as dvds replaced vhs then probably.

DVDs and Blu-rays devices will coexist as separate classes for quite a while, because the inner working are too different. E.g. DVD players are all basically SD devices, while Blu-rays must be HD. Blu-ray players with nothing but a single HDMI and a coax digital output exist, while DVD players still carry a full array of analog outputs. Also, MP4 (h264), progressive-scan etc. are mandatory in Blu-ray, while on DVD players they are optional "super-features". Finally, DVD players are so mass-produced and cheap, that any generic chinese manufacturer can use a grey-market "do-it-all" chipset & firmware and sell their own "DVD/MP3/DivX" player for dirt cheap. Blu-ray is still accessible only to major manufacturers.

[Gryzor]

BR drive on my laptop (have ever watched a disk though) plus Kodi running on an AFTV.

[mr_lou]

BR drive on my laptop (have ever watched a disk though) plus Kodi running on an AFTV.

Awesome. I'm afraid I don't know what an AFTV is. I tried googling but that didn't help me much.

Big fan of Kodi?
I've only tried it once when testing it on a Rasberry Pi. I love how you can control it using the standard remote control of your TV.
Looking forward to trying it out when BD-J support is added.
Does Kodi on your AFTV auto-update? What version are you currently running?

[Gryzor]

Ah, apologies, AFTV is the common name for Amazon Fire TV.


Been using XBMC/Kodi for a while now, first on a RPi and then on the AFTV. On RPi control through the TV remote is done by CEC if I recall correctly, so you need a compatible TV set. Very handy! I absolutely love Kodi because it's very easy to use with tons of functionality... beautiful too, depending on the skin you use and with a big WAF factor. Can also be controlled through my phone/tablet/watch (and it provides great functionality too for the second screen, for instance I can check the cast while watching). Never going back to dedicated media players!


Running a dedicated version for Android called SPMC. It's really optimized for the platform though you may not notice it in most cases.

[mr_lou]

Does anyone here own any of the Popcorn Hour devices?

I've read in an old forum thread I found, that they offer playback of non-encrypted Blu-ray's with full BD-J menu support.

Popcorn Hour A-210 and A-300 apparently weren't born with this feature, but seems to have been added in a firmware update later.
Popcorn Hour C-200 and C-300 were born with this feature.

Anyone has any experience with any of these? I'm curious to check one out.