thebluview

Pioneer Corporation and Sharp Corporation have announced that they have signed a partnership agreement on the establishment of a joint venture in the optical disk business area.

The goal of the new joint venture is to make more effective use of the management resources of the two companies in the optical disk business field, and to capture a leadership position in this area, particularly in the Blu-ray Disc market where significant growth is expected in the future.

The optical disk businesses of the two companies will be transferred to the new joint venture, with a target date for the start of operations around October 1, 2009. The new company will engage in the development, design, manufacture, and sales of optical disk products, focusing on optical disk drives, recorders, and players.

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Due to be available from June 20th in the UK Panasonic has announced two new BluRay recorders and a single HD freesat PVR with DVD recorder. The main source for these recorders seems to be the built-in freesat recorder which will allow you to record HD programs from the Freesat satellite system and then shift them over and archive then to a BluRay disk. The recorders can also take HD content from HD camcorders via SDHC memory card or USB including HD recordings in AVCHD.
No word yet on any other inputs such as HDMI or component. It would be  nice to have one of these without the Freesat decoder to hook up to a Sky+HD box to archive some programs as currently there are only 2 HD channels on Freesat and around 30 on Sly.
Full details here

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Pop over to ExtremeTech for a review of four BluRay drives from Sony, LG, Plexstore and LiteOn

Also check out our quick review of the LG drive here

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Pioneer today announced availability of the fastest BluRay writer for the PC (it was previously announced but not available until now). The BDR-203BK (catchy!) can write both single layer 25GB and dual layer 50GB disks at 8x speed., that’s 36MB a second or roughly 12 minutes for a single layer disk and 24 minutes for a dual layer. Not too shabby.  The drive also ships with CyberLink’s Blu-ray Disc Suite 6.
Price is expected to be around €250, £220 and in the US $350, oh and it’s also available in beige for you not yet out of the 80′s
Full specifications here

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Two questions: Where does your BluRay player reside in your living room and how many people actually access the BD Live content linked form their disks?

Would the number of people access BD Live be higher if your BluRay player had built-in Wi-Fi? Most BluRay players are close to your TV and not near your broadband internet connection or router. Currently the only solution is the Sony PS3 which does have built in 802.11g Wi-Fi but why are there no others? Is the answer that player manufacturers are in a race to make players as cheap as possible to hit the mass market? I don’t think so, we are seeing lots of new high end BluRay players that are only profile 1.1 and forgo any internet connectivity. Could it be because building in Wi-Fi is expensive? No Wi-Fi chipsets are a matter of a few dollars and the antenna is a couple of bits of wire. Do you need to shield the vital audio and video circuitry from Wi-Fi radio interference? I guess this could be a valid argument but how many laptops, game consoles, mobile phones and PC’s are in your house these days emitting Wi-Fi signals, do they interfere? No. We are seeing a number of high-end amplifiers and receivers incorporating Wi-Fi for internet radio but the quality of most internet radio is so bad you wouldn’t notice the interference. However on a mid-range or high-end player adding a little cost for extra shielding for a lot of convenience should be a no brainer.

Let’s face it, there is no reason why it should not be built-in other than cost but will profile 2.0 interactivity really take off without it? I’m not sure. If you’re a movie studio and your building these great internet sites accessible from BluRay players and no one accesses them, how long are you going to keep doing it? Will you revert back to just providing the extras and features on the disk and forget the expense of making special online content, in these financial times I can see this happening and BD Live will die.

I have been investigating some solutions and also looking for a solution to get my SlingBox on my Wireless ‘N’ network as well as my son’s Sony BDPS-350 (profile 2.0 capable – just add USB memory stick and connect a LAN cable!). However to get the best from the new 802.11n standard you need to run your adapters with WPA2 security and there are very few adapters available that support this. If you don’t want to run at the latest and highest speeds then there are solutions such as the D-Link DWL-G810, I’ve used one of these for around a year before I upgraded to ‘N’ with the SlingBox, it worked fine and was very easy to configure (on a PC or laptop first). There are others but they are usually sold as ‘Wireless Game Adaptors’. They take the standard Ethernet or LAN connection on the back of your player and convert this into wireless and then send it to your wireless router. The D-Link supports WPA security but not WPA2. There is another solution in view, at the CES show in January Cisco announced the WGA600N (you guessed it – WGA=Wireless Game Adaptor) again missing a large market. This new solution supports wireless ‘N’ as well as WPA2 security so is looking like the one to go for, pricing is around the $100 (£70-£80 when available in the UK) of course this it much more expensive than having it built into a player.

If you want to get the most from your BluRay collection and you (or your other half) don’t like the idea of trailing wires around your house then there are solutions, I hope to review the WGA600N soon.

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Well I finally decided to upgrade my main PC to play back Blu Ray movies. I settled on the LG Super Multi Blu drive. My machine runs Windows Vista Home Premium so I was hoping to integrate the playback into Media Centre. First of all there are a few things you will need

A  Display that supports HDCP,  Video card that supports HDCP,  Blu Ray drive,  Blu Ray decoding software,  A fairly powerful CPU to do the Blu Ray video and audio decoding

Installing the drive which has a SATA interface was as painful as installing any CD or DVD drive and took just a few minutes. Next install the CD that comes with the drive which includes CyberLink Power DVD. This was the first issue, after installing all this and rebooting I was informed I needed an update. This update turned out to be a complete 102MB new version of Power DVD – time to go make a coffee. Once this is down and you’ve rebooted again you should be able to play Blu Ray movies. However I noticed the volume was quite a bit lower than the rest of my system and usual Blu Ray device, a PS3, this I can live with by setting the default volumes on my Onkyo receiver. Now Blu Ray movies played fine under Power DVD but Media Centre does not have any Blu Ray play back.

To get Media Centre to play ball you need a plug-in. I used a plug-in written by Armyb77 which you can down load form here. This enables Media Centre to run Power DVD when you wish to watch a Blu Ray, it’s not as pretty as getting Media Centre to display it directly but it works. When you quit Power DVD, Media Centre comes back up.

The only weak spot with this solution would be the sound card, while it sounded fine I’m sure I was getting down mix of Dolby Digital as there was no difference which ever audio track I was playing and limited activity from the surrounds. If you are looking at this solution for your main Blu Ray playback device (with the bonus of gaming and web surfing on a large display) then you should look at a solution such as those from Auzentech which offer cards with HDMI pass through.

To give you an idea this is my setup. Processor Intel Core2 Q9450 CPU overclocked to 3.2GHz, 4GB PC 8500 RAM, ASUS Maximus Formula motherboard, PNY Nvidia 9800 GTX+ 512MB with the latest WHQL drivers and finally a Creative X-Fi Extreme Gamer sound card with the 7.1 analogue cable plugged into an Onkyo TX-SR806 receiver (review coming soon). For the display as this machine is in my main room it’s running through a Sharp LC52X1CE 52” LCD TV.

Altogether this solution worked well, picture quality was good is not quite up to the PS3 which is a little disappointing as I was running a high end view card with Nvidia PureVideo decoding enabled but this is no fault of the LG drive which performed flawlessly. It also includes software to back up your PC (rather expensive with the price of BluRay blanks) and video editing software. The drive also supports HD-DVD and it might be a solution if you already have some of these disks but enough said about that, this is The BluView

When I can get hold of a Blu Ray writer I’ll post a article of that, I’ve a Sanyo Xacti HD1000 HD Camcorder and can’t wait to create some Blu Ray disks….

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