Apple iTunes & Blu-ray Disc

I'm sure you figured this out by now, but Blu-Ray support has NOT been added to iTunes so far. At least it's not working for me. I can neither use the "Backup to Disc Function", nor can I burn playlists to Blu-ray discs. As long as I put in CDs or DVDs it works perfectly, making sets across multiple discs if needed. But it won't recognize Blu-ray media. It just spits it back out and asks for a blank disc again. So much for my expensive investment in backup technology. I made one Blu-ray backup so far by just manually burning just the files through Roxio's Toast, which supports Blu-ray. But doing it this way you don't have the iTunes playlist that is created when you do it directly through iTunes, so if you put the disc in, it won't show up in iTunes. You have to import it as a regular file and often TV Shows get set as Movie for some reason, requiring a bunch of tweaking every time you were to restore a Blu-ray backup.

Anyway, I hope they add Blu-ray support soon and stop toying with the customers because they want more money by not supporting a technology that competes with their online movie business.

jekins wrote:
Anyway, I hope they add Blu-ray support soon and stop toying with the customers because they want more money by not supporting a technology that competes with their online movie business.

If apple were concerned about competition from physical media formats, they would not allow you to play back DVD's on their system. Since they don;t, It more has to do with their lacks of Blue ray support on any of their systems.

First of all, you're mistaken about the lack of Blu-ray support. I have an external Blu-ray drive from IO Data. It worked perfectly straight out of the box. I just plugged it in to the USB port on my iMac, inserted a Blu-ray disc, and it immediately was mounted and showed up on the desktop with a little "BD" mark on the disc icon. The hardware itself is supported. Apple is just choosing not to add Blu-ray playback capability to the DVD player software, and it's also choosing not to add support to iTunes. The physical capacity is all there... It's all Apple's choice not to include the easily implementable features, which I might add, that many PC-side software companies are releasing. PowerDVD, WinDVD and others already have had Blu-ray playback support for a long time.

And as for DVD, I disagree with you -- DVD was a different time and a different situation. When Apple started to include DVD drives and software support, it had nothing to lose and everything to again from doing so. They had no online TV show or Movie business, yet they had droves of customers who wanted support for playing their movies. DVD was a de-facto standard and Apple would've committed suicide by not including support for it. Blu-ray, on the other hand, is like a game of Jenga. They are riding this line as long as possible, waiting to see if they can turn customers on to online downloads and completely bypass Blu-ray becoming the next "DVD".

jekins wrote:
First of all, you're mistaken about the lack of Blu-ray support. I have an external Blu-ray drive from IO Data. It worked perfectly straight out of the box. I just plugged it in to the USB port on my iMac, inserted a Blu-ray disc, and it immediately was mounted and showed up on the desktop with a little "BD" mark on the disc icon. The hardware itself is supported. Apple is just choosing not to add Blu-ray playback capability to the DVD player software, and it's also choosing not to add support to iTunes. The physical capacity is all there... It's all Apple's choice not to include the easily implementable features, which I might add, that many PC-side software companies are releasing. PowerDVD, WinDVD and others already have had Blu-ray playback support for a long time.

1) I never said that the hardware was not supported. I was actually referring to the OS support for playback which you note does not work. Without the OS support, it won't work in iTunes.
2) I doubt that supporting it will be as easy as you imply.
3) Third party software support is irrelevant. The PC supports the HDCP interface. The Mac does not. That is the reason that BlueRay has not been added on the Mac Side of things as well as iTunes. Until Apple can work that in, there really isn't a reason for them to tinker around with a format that has not faced wide demand yet.
4) Toast supports the blue ray burning (albeit on a limited basis) interface using their own system.

"They are riding this line as long as possible, waiting to see if they can turn customers on to online downloads and completely bypass Blu-ray becoming the next "DVD". "

And it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the FACT that Blu-ray is an incomplete standard right?

Back up your claims.

All of this is completely off the original posters topic since he/she has a Windows system, not a Mac, so discussions of Blu-Ray support in Mac OS X are irrelevant. If you want to discuss/debate Blu-Ray support and lack thereof in Mac OS X, it would be a kindness to the original poster if you take the subject to another thread in a different forum.

Regards.

You make a good point that the original poster is talking about a PC. But that doesn't detract from the point that Apple is choosing not to support Blu-ray in iTunes as I said.

I'm not sure, by the way, what this other person is saying about Blu-ray being an incomplete standard though. As far as I understand it's now an internationally accepted standard.