Blu-Ray And Apple ‘Books - Battery Power Crunch?
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
by Charles W. Moore
Apple is expected to offer Blu-Ray HD optical drives drives in Macs in the not too distant future. “The end of the format war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD promises to accelerate shipment volume of Blu-Ray DVD equipment,” according to Mark Kirstein, President of MultiMedia Intelligence. “As a result, Blu-Ray DVD equipment could become the largest volume segment of IP-Enabled Consumer devices even sooner than 2012.”
Yesterday, Macworld UK’s Jonny Evans reported that Sony is in talks with Apple and Microsoft on a mission to provide Blu-ray drives for computers and console games. Citing a report in the Financial TImes, Evans said that Sony US president Stan Glasgow has confirmed talks with Apple and Microsoft, which would see Blu-ray deployed within both Xbox 360 and Mac systems.
Apple actually joined the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) two years ago, becoming a member of the consortium’s Board of Directors. At the time, Steve Jobs commented: “Apple is pleased to join the Blu-ray Disc Association board as part of our efforts to drive consumer adoption of HD. Consumers are already creating stunning HD content with Apple’s leading video editing applications like iMovie HD and are anxiously awaiting a way to burn their own high def DVDs.” Well, 24 months have passed and we’re still anxiously waiting.
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But how successfully will Blu-Ray run on notebook computers, especially for movie playback?
Last week, Wired’s Bryan Gardiner posted a commentary asking “Will New Blu-ray Drives Suck Your Laptop Battery Dry?”
It’s a question I hadn’t considered before, but a topical one now that Blu-Ray has won the DVD format wars with Gardiner raising the question of whether “the promise of viewing an increasing variety of HD movies on your laptop may be overshadowed by ongoing concerns over the technology’s vampiric effect on battery life.”
So, is this likely to be a problem? I decided to ask someone who has a substantial amount of experience with Blu-Ray drives in Apple laptops, Michael Lowdermilk of FastMac, which has been selling retrofit Blu-Ray drive conversions for Apple computers for the past year or so. FastMac can even equip your eight-year-old Pismo PowerBook with a Blu-Ray expansion bay module if you can go the $1000 price of admission.
I asked Michael Lowdermilk what sort of effect on battery life he had noticed and did he expect this issue to be a serious problem for laptop users.
He commented:
“We haven’t noticed any power issues or received any complaints from our customers but it still maybe too early to tell especially given the fact that Blu-Ray movie playback is not available on the Mac. Right now you can only author a Blu-Ray movie that will play on a Blu-Ray player attached to a TV through Adobe Encore 3 and you can perform large scale data backups (50 GB per disc) to Blu-Ray media through Toast Titanium.
“Once Apple comes out with some drivers and officially supports it through Leopard we’ll be able to see if there are any power issues.”
So the jury is still out on this issue, although it seems likely that if you’re planning to watch DVD movies on your ‘Book, it might also be a good idea to invest in an extended life battery (or two). FastMac can fix you up with those as well.
Also last week, http://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/29/power-hungry-blu-ray-drives-delaying-apple-notebook-adoption/ MacRumors’ Arnold Kim suggested that while Blu-ray is expected to first arrive in their Mac Pro models, notebook owners may have to wait a little longer before they are adopted in MacBooks and MacBook Pros, but on a more hopeful note, reported that the Blu-ray Disc Association is claiming the power consumption issue has been resolved and some laptops are now able to play 2 Blu-ray movies back-to-back on a single charge. One of the solutions has been the ability to offload this decoding to modern video cards.
But if you just can’t wait, as noted, FastMac already offers Blu-Ray optical drive upgrades for a variety of Apple systems.
Slot-Load Blu-Ray drives are available for the iBook G4, PowerBook G3 (Pismo), PowerBook G4 Titanium, PowerBook G4 Aluminum, MacBook Pro 17,”
iMac G5, iMac Intel, and Mac mini.
Tray-load Blu_Rays are available for the eMac G4, iMac G4 , PowerMac G3 (Blue & White), PowerMac G4 (all models) ,PowerMac G5 (all models), and Mac Pro.
Slot-load units are $999.00, while tray-loaders are $579.95.
Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disk (BD) is a next generation optical disk format developed by a consortium of electronics and computer manufacturers including Apple, Dell, HP, JVC, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony & TDK. The format was designed to enable the recording and playback of High Definition (HD) content and to allow storage of large amounts (up to 200 Gb) of data. While current optical drive technologies rely on a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue-violet laser (hence the name, Blu-ray). The blue-violet laser has a 38% shorter wavelength (405nm) than a red laser (650nm), allowing the drive’s optical pickup unit to focus more precisely than ever before. Data can then be packed more densely on standard sized disks. Despite using a new type of laser, Blu-ray drives are compatible with standard DVD and CD media through the use of a combined red, blue & violet optical reader and writer.
In addition to broad support from the electronics, music, computer & video game industry, the major Hollywood film studios also support Blu-ray media, with Disney, Fox, Lionsgate, MGM & Sony deciding to release their movies exclusively in the Blu-ray format. With its forward and backward integration with new and old media, Blu-ray is touted as being poised to become the successor to today’s DVD format.
In the meantime, Fastmac’s, slot loading 2x Blu-Ray drive provides up to 50 Gb of storage on a single disk, and the Blu-Ray drive is still compatible with standard CD and DVD media and is bootable. The drive can write to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 8x speed in single layer and 2x speed in dual/ double layer mode. It can rewrite to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 4x speeds. The drive also supports DVD-RAM reading and writing at up to 5x speeds and standard CD-R and CD-RW burning at 8x speeds. And you can even have it on a Pismo an iBook G4 or a Blue & White PowerMac G3, as well as most newer Macs but not yet the 15” MacBook Pro or 13” MacBook, and likely never for the MacBook Air.
A Blu-ray drive gives users who need large amounts of storage capacity such as photographers, graphics artists, videographers & musicians the ability to save data twice as fast, while system and database administrators can archive and retrieve large amounts of data on one convenient disk rather than a stack of CD-Rs or DVD-Rs. And consumers will be able watch HD content in true high definition with surround sound anytime & anywhere they happen to be (if the battery power holds up). Blu-ray is the next generation of disk storage technology entertainment delivery and if you;re impatient, you can have it today thanks to Fastmac’s upgrades.
Fastmac’s Blu-Ray slot loading drive has been tested and certified compatible with Adobe’s Premiere Pro CS3 video production software that includes Adobe Encore CS3 and is part of the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium Collection. Adobe Encore CS3 integrates with Adobe Photoshop & Adobe Premiere to provide a rich set of creative tools for the production and output of full-featured, menu-driven DVD and Blu-Ray Discs. It’s the only video production and editing software available for the Mac OS that supports built-in Blu-Ray Disc authoring for playback on stand-alone Blu-Ray DVD players & the Sony PlayStation 3.
Fastmac’s Blu-ray drives support reading, writing and re-writing to single and dual layer Blu-ray media at up to 2x speeds. The drive is also compatible with standard DVD and CD media and can write to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 8x speed in single layer and up to 2.4x speed in dual/ double layer mode. It can rewrite to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 4x speeds. The drive also supports DVD-RAM reading and writing at up to 5x speeds and standard CD-R and CD-RW burning at 8x speeds.
Fastmac’s slimline Blu-ray slot loading optical drive upgrade requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 or higher and is compatible with the following Apple computers:
iBook G4
iMac G5
iMac Intel
MacBook Pro (17-inch)
Mac mini
PowerBook G3 Pismo
PowerBook G4 Titanium (667 MHz or higher) PowerBook G4 Aluminum
Blu-ray burning requires 3rd-party software such as Adobe Premiere CS3 or Roxio’s Toast 8 Titanium, which enables Blu-ray disk support in the Mac OS Finder. Native support for Blu-ray burning within iLife & iTunes is expected in the future via Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, but cannot be guaranteed at this time.
For more information, visit:
http://fastmac.com/slim_bluray.php
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