Pioneer is Feeling Blu

They're putting a 33 MB/sec transfer rate on a drive that has a capacity of 35 GB? Ridiculous. How long until SATA is used for removable drives?

US, Japan and East Asia to reportedly share some region coding for Blu-ray by the way -

http://www.engadget.com/2005/12/27/us-japan-joyous-in-blu-ray-region-1-embrace/

cool, I can't wait to spend $20 for one blank disc and 1K for the burner.....

I'm not buying into either format (apart from a getting a PS3) until there are both PC drives and consumer players (for plugging into the TV) which do both formats, or one format is dead.

Their a bunch of complete fuckwits for refusing to compromise and agree on a single standard.

Release a Pioneer Blu-Rom slot-in player and I'll buy it. I swear by their stuff.

When it says the drive has a 33 MB/s transfer rate, are those actual...you know, MBs or "that other" way of stating speed in the same way that Steam used to make its download speeds look bigger than they actually were.

How does this compare to, say, the drive speed of a current DVD drive?

Right now I think I'm preferring HD-DVD, simply because I remember hearing that they wouldn't have region codes (which I've always seen as arbitrary, stupid, and artificial...at best a bad idea...at worst a way to fuck some people over where convenient through bad technology)...and I remember hearing that Blu-Ray was supposed to have all sorts of annoying DRM shit that would inconvenience me (the honest guy who always pays for shit...even to the point of paying 50 bucks for a CD thats rare or 70 bucks for a used game) while doing little to hurt the folks they're really concerned about. I remember hearing that I'd have to have a Blu-Ray player connected to the internet...that my disc would be registered to ONE player or something. I like being able to just pop something into whatever player I have or just bought and play the fucker...I like it to be a seamless experience for me (thats a selling point I think). A lot of DRM seems to be inconvenience that doesn't do jack-shit for ME. People talk about how great consoles are because you don't have to install shit or do this or that or the other...I'm not bothered about that stuff with a PC personally...because its a technology issue. If something is a matter of technology...if its just the nature of the beast, or if there's a good trade-off for the inconvenience then I'm willing to put up with it. But if I'm losing something or dealing with more bullshit thats not simply inherent to the technology I'm using, but was designed into it...and if that bullshit does nothing for me...I don't see it as a selling point...I see it as something that they've gotta really compensate for to get me to look past it.

I'm not sure if what I've heard is accurate...but I will say that whichever technology has less unneeded bullshit will get my support.

I hope you are all smart enough to realize this is all a push by tech makers to get you to buy new hardware (they arent making anything on DVD players anymore and HDTVs still dont have a lot of content) and movie studios to double....even triple-dip releases. And if your smart enough to realize that, please ignor all your geek "gotta have new tech" urges and ignor all this crap atleast for a year or so, otherwise your just telling these compaines they can pan more money from the market by creating a "false" tech dead-end and introducing a "better" technology. Theres still plenty of life for DVDs and they look pretty good even on HDTV for the most part.

Technically more advanced isn’t a guaranteed win.

I don’t think that the movie watching populace at large will care one bit about having more pixels than DVD for their home movies. Sure the cool kids will want the bits but the majority of folks won’t pay one penny more for something that they wont even be able to appreciate.

I’m typically an early adopter to this kind of stuff but this HD/BR stuff has me pretty pissed off. I’m outraged that they are bringing two incompatible formats to the market.

I may buy one of the PC drives for recording HDTV broadcasts from MCE but I wont buy any of the movies until one format defeats the other.

"can write DVD-R and DVD-RW discs, says Pioneer."

What about DVD+R and DVD+RW discs?

This article says DRM might delay Blu-Ray:

http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/archives/2005/12/drm_to_delay_bl.html

Blu-ray is gonna win this thing. It's got better support at this point and it's technically more advanced

there are fairly credible rumors that later revisions of Xbox 360 will include HD-DVD capability for movie playback

Though the MS execs killed this rumor outright.

/goes looking for the news story/press release

that's great. I've had any number of DVD drives in my PCs for the past 5 years not but I've never actually put a DVD into one of them.

will blu-ray drives read CD-ROMS extra fast or extra blu?