News Pioneer Blu-ray PC drive

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/09/01/pioneer_BRD-101A/

 

Nice to see that it will be immediately available on PC. Does this mean that Blu-Ray is the officially chosen HD disc media, however? And as we enter much bigger media, is it going to start being efficient to have optical drives on the SATA bus?

 

Welcome to the bit-tech forums Adnuo.

Several manufacturers, including HP and Philips, are set to introduce BD-enabled desktop machines by Christmas, well ahead of the expected Spring 2006 launch of PlayStation 3.

In terms of the defacto HD disc media, the future is still unclear. The Toshiba-led HD DVD consortium are still out there doing their thing, so one of three things will happen:

1) The two groups will get together and ratify a single standard
2) We will have HD DVD and Blu-ray, but just like DVD-R and DVD+R, there will be hybrid drives that support both
3) If that isn't possible, we will have a fractured market place of HD DVD and Blu-ray, riddled with compatibility problems etc

As for SATA, there are already several DVD burners available for SATA. EIDE (or UDMA 66/100) is still capable of achieving the required transfer rates for these new formats, but it will be eventually phased out in favour of SATA.

 

I think they tried option 1 recently and failed miserably My weapon of choice though.
2) not too bad, but not really preferable. Although HD and BD are definately more distinctly different, going with capacity and whatnot., I would still prefer a single format. More with set-top players than anything else, because some don't support DVD-R and DVD+R, etc.
3) BAD!

What with PS3 and these BD burners (burners, not even ROM's to start!) being announced/becoming available, I think BluRay will "win". I prefer it because it's an extra ten gigs per layer more than anything else, but as long as it's just one I don't care THAT much.

I just feel that the whole reasoning behind blueray/hddvd is a lot of BS. I've viewed 1080p and re-encoded DVD in Xvid (700mb for the full movie) and they look the same in my eyes. Not to mention the HDMC scrambling or whatever, that's just not cool.

SATA's good though. I've got a sad feeling that PATA will die before floppies. TBH I feel it should be SATA-only so it really has that next-gen "feel", much like WD not making a PATA Raptor.

 

I agree with all of that Firehed. This Pioneer drive is an OEM product, and those big system builders have obviously specified PATA over SATA. You'd *think* SATA was infinitely preferable but unfortunately if they can save 5 cents by going PATA, then will.

In reality, PATA motherboard + drive is likely to be several dollars cheaper than the SATA combo, giving them even more reason to do it.

As for the death of floppies, who still uses them?? I know you're referring to the motherboard ports, but my PC has been floppy-less for years now. Probably the only drivers that still come on floppy are RAID drivers - everyone else has moved to CD, and users have migrated to USB memory drives.

 

Problem is though this drive wont read cd's so OEM's will have to include another optical drive or a floppy, which will increase costs. I assume that there will be drives capable of reading cd's in future, if not this could be an opportunity for HD-DVD.

 

That's true, though we have no information at this stage about a CD / DVD / BD combo drive.

 

yay!
i reckon ill wait about a year for them to drop to a reasonable price then grab a sata one (and hopefully media will be cheaper then too)

are you serious? cos to me theres a world of difference between dvd and HDTV
what have you been watching them on? the difference isnt quite as noticeable to me on my old 17" crt runnign 1280 but 19" crt running 1600x1200 the difference is very much noticeable and where i have the option i always get hdtv res vids (apple trailers have a few now, but not enough )

 

Well, I think this will be very good for backups, I wouldn't be paying £200 right away, but once the speed gets to 4x and at a reasonable price I'll be getting it. I'm not prepared to wait 1 1/2 hours to fill up a disc at 1x!

However, are we going to get movies on these discs? It seems pointless if 15GB of space is going to be wasted on a blu-ray disc when you can fit it perfectly onto DVD. But having multiple movies on on disc seems a nice idea.

 

its for HDTV res movies, they're like 11-16gig

 

Though of course, if it's legal in your jurisdiction, there's no reason why you couldn't use a 25 GB BluRay disc to backup several DVDs without the losses incurred in re-encoding them to a less space-consuming format.

 

hmm... so at 16gig a movie I would need a 320gig hd to store my dvds if they were blu ray. Although of course I would never store my blue ray films on my hard disk as it's ilegal to break copy protection here.... and how is this in the interest of the public?

 

i dont see how the filesize has anything to do with the general public
they buy the disc, they put it in their blu-ray player and they watch the super hi-def movie that looks a lot better than the dvd version (as long as they have a HDTV...)

 

It does matter to people where copy protection does not apply and is legal to rip em to your HDD and want to store all their movies on a server to stream off etc...

 

thats not the general public tho thats just a few people in comparison

 

Some reading material about DRM on Blu-ray: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/10/1917210&tid=188&tid=198&tid=126&tid=233

 

Sounds cool, but it looks like the first PC Drive ever Made...

 

Sweet, can't wait to get my hands on one. Might wait until prices go down first though. Any word on the availability of the BD-R media?

 

looks a bit unstylish and im deffinatly going to wait for prices to drop. looks like blueray might be for the win over compatability?

 

I don't care how it looks, but how it works.

I have a Pioneer DVR-108 which is very ugly, but it's a great DVD burner.