Although Steve Jobs has said official internal Blu-ray drives will not be heading to Macs anytime soon, Other World Computing (OWC) has announced the launch of its Mercury Pro Blu-ray external Blu-ray burner which features a quad interface that will allow it to connect to Macs.
The OWC can connect via USB 2.0, FireWire 400, Firewire 800, or eSATA to Macs or PCs and will write BD-R or ... [ read the full article ]
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Will HD-DVD blank media continue to exist after the creation of this drive? There is no point in providing HD-DVD burning if media will not be available at a large scale, unless Toshiba focuses on production of blank media. This would be awesome but a the same time bad because it will hurt sony in every way. If Toshiba were to focus and develop licensing of its blank HD-DVD media to disc manufactures, I'm most certain sales of Blu-ray movies would drop because everyone would transcode movies into HD-DVD. Since Toshiba owns most of the codecs, toshiba could in fact restrict or deny its licensing of its codecs and this would force Sony to revert back to its MPEG-2codec they were using during the initial stage of blu-ray movies.
Originally posted by locobrown: Since Toshiba owns most of the codecs,
Toshiba owns the codecs?
Toshiba is only a small part of the patent pool for both VC-1 and AVC. Toshiba doesn't have the clout to forceSony or any BluRay studio to use a codec it doesn't want to use. In fact, it's more profitable for Toshiba is studios continue to use AVC and VC-1 since they get a part of the licensing fees.
The License Pools for the codecs used in BluRay/HD DVD:
VC-1
Quote:MPEG LA's VC-1 Patent Portfolio License currently includes patents owned by DAEWOO Electronics Corporation; France Télécom, société anonyme*; Fujitsu Limited; Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.; LG Electronics Inc.; Microsoft Corporation; Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation; Panasonic Corporation; Pantech&Curitel Communications, Inc.; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; Sharp Corporation; Siemens AG; Sony Corporation; Telenor ASA; Toshiba Corporation; Victor Company of Japan, Ltd. (JVC).
Quote:MPEG LA's AVC Patent Portfolio License currently includes patents owned by DAEWOO Electronics Corporation; Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute; France Télécom, société anonyme*; Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der angewandten Forschung e.V.; Fujitsu Limited; Hitachi, Ltd.; Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V.; LG Electronics Inc.; Microsoft Corporation; Mitsubishi Electric Corporation; NTT DoCoMo, Inc.; Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation; Panasonic Corporation; Robert Bosch GmbH**; Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.; Scientific-Atlanta Vancouver Company; Sedna Patent Services, LLC; Sharp Corporation; Siemens AG; Sony Corporation; The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York; Toshiba Corporation; and Victor Company of Japan, Ltd.
blank hd-dvd will exist because the players still exsist.. for a while blu ray content has been extracted and put on hd-dvd disc for other countries hence why its region free.. =]
