Evolving Blu-ray Format Will Leave Some Behind

Reservoir Hill writes "Blu-ray may have taken a commanding lead in the next-generation format war, but Betanews is reporting that early supporters of Blu-ray will be left out in the cold when the Blu-ray Disc Association introduces BD Profile 2.0, expected to arrive in October. Unlike HD DVD, which from the very beginning mandated features such as local storage, a second video and audio decoder for picture-in-picture, and a network connection, the companies behind Blu-ray took a different approach to keep costs down. 'We should have waited another year to introduce Blu-ray to the public, but the format war changed the situation,' said one developer. Representatives at the Blu-ray booth at CES said that the PlayStation 3 is currently the only player they would recommend, due to upcoming changes to the platform. Asked if they were concerned about a backlash from early adopters who supported the format from the beginning, one representative said: 'They knew what they were getting into.'"

Mass return of all BluRay players?

[Christopher_G_Lewis]

So will we now see a mass return of all the recently bought BluRay players?

This is *exactly* friggin' why technology gets such a crappy reputation. Products not ready for mainstream are pushed out because marketing says its time.

I really hope that this does in BluRay - friggin' DRM ridden POS.

BTW - why don't you see a huge backlash against BluRay for region coding? I was just visiting friends that are ex-pats in Spain, and in order to watch their DVD's, they have *3* players hooked up - US, Europe and Australian - to deal with DVD's they have from everywhere they've lived.

None of that crap with HD-DVD - they eliminated regionalization.

Re:Semi-Expected

[zonker]

You can't upgrade many of the features the new profiles require with firmware unless the hardware is already there.

Profile 1.1 requires a secondary video and audio processor for PIP support as well as a minimum of 256meg of local storage.

Profile 2.0 requires everything 1.1 has plus an ethernet port and a minimum of 1gig local storage.

Everyone seems to know about the ethernet port but few people seem to know about the storage issue. Profile 2.0 will be an issue with all but a small handful of players on the market today.