According to Windows7Center.com there has been confirmation from Microsoft that there will be no built in Bluray playback supported in Windows 7. We already knew this but according to the blog post Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky has confirmed that there is extensibility for Media Center for 3rd party’s to add Bluray playback:
Blu-Ray support will be provided by PC makers or BRD drive makers. We have new extensibility in media center for those that provide BRD playback to support integrated playback. We do have support for burning BRD data discs.
We have seen PowerDVD and others coming out with Media Center Bluray applications but with Windows 7 supporting so many codecs out of the box it’s a shame 3rd pary application have to be installed to get Bluray working. Do you think that Microsoft got it wrong on Bluray support or is it irrelevant?
8 thoughts on “No Bluray playback for Windows (but we knew that anyway)”
FAIL! Anyone with a Blu-Ray drive should expect it to “just work” without additional software. What if DVDs would not play? What if audio CDs would not play? Who wants to buy an “operating system” that doesn’t?
Windows7 needs to have native Blu-Ray playback. Sure we know what software to purchase and what to avoid. But Windows7 Media Center needs to be aimed to replace devices and bring everything under 1 roof. I do that already, but I had to do a lot of work to get it there. I had high hopes for W7
They were willing to jump on the HD-DVD bandwagon early on with the XBOX, but they won’t support Blu-Ray now? I expected them to raise the bar after promising to put Blu-Ray burning in the next Vista service pack. But apparently they’re going to keep it exactly the same.
Waiting possibly for the next release of Windows will be a mistake.
It’s as irrelevant as MCE has become as a stand alone function set. It should still be there though, just DVD playback should have never been through 3rd party. Maybe the home server guys will get it right and know that they need to work with all content and archiving to own the garage.
Microsoft want Media Center to be at the heart of your entertainment world, and yet it isn’t even supporting Blu-Ray in it’s next OS. Blu-ray has been out for 3 years now, and while it only sells about 10% as much as DVD, it’s the kind of people who buy media centers that also buy Blu-ray. If they want to be credible as a platform, it should be in there.
There is an issue here people probably don’t realise. Anti-Trust! Particularly in europe if Microsoft was to include Native Blu-Ray playback there would be immediate anti-trust cases in the European courts accusing of exploiting their dominant market position to the detriment of people like Cyberlink, Another case of where this type of regulation which is meant to help the consumer actuallys works against what most consumers would want. I
I’ll not argue with any of the above. I do like the idea of integration. I take that to mean if I have the right things installed then it would be like adding a new engine to Media Center or Media Player that would allow the playback. This is good because we wouldn’t get a 2nd window popup like when trying to get BRD to work with Vista. May even make it more extensible for extenders.
If the argument about antitrust applies, why are the cases not there for DVD playback, after all, these applications also provide DVD playback as standard – and in fact in MCE05, when MS didn’t provide the dvd decoder, and you had to buy nvidia’s offering – I don’t recall any anti-trust cases being raised then.
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FAIL! Anyone with a Blu-Ray drive should expect it to “just work” without additional software. What if DVDs would not play? What if audio CDs would not play? Who wants to buy an “operating system” that doesn’t?
Windows7 needs to have native Blu-Ray playback. Sure we know what software to purchase and what to avoid. But Windows7 Media Center needs to be aimed to replace devices and bring everything under 1 roof. I do that already, but I had to do a lot of work to get it there. I had high hopes for W7
They were willing to jump on the HD-DVD bandwagon early on with the XBOX, but they won’t support Blu-Ray now? I expected them to raise the bar after promising to put Blu-Ray burning in the next Vista service pack. But apparently they’re going to keep it exactly the same.
Waiting possibly for the next release of Windows will be a mistake.
It’s as irrelevant as MCE has become as a stand alone function set. It should still be there though, just DVD playback should have never been through 3rd party. Maybe the home server guys will get it right and know that they need to work with all content and archiving to own the garage.
Microsoft want Media Center to be at the heart of your entertainment world, and yet it isn’t even supporting Blu-Ray in it’s next OS. Blu-ray has been out for 3 years now, and while it only sells about 10% as much as DVD, it’s the kind of people who buy media centers that also buy Blu-ray. If they want to be credible as a platform, it should be in there.
There is an issue here people probably don’t realise. Anti-Trust! Particularly in europe if Microsoft was to include Native Blu-Ray playback there would be immediate anti-trust cases in the European courts accusing of exploiting their dominant market position to the detriment of people like Cyberlink, Another case of where this type of regulation which is meant to help the consumer actuallys works against what most consumers would want. I
I’ll not argue with any of the above. I do like the idea of integration. I take that to mean if I have the right things installed then it would be like adding a new engine to Media Center or Media Player that would allow the playback. This is good because we wouldn’t get a 2nd window popup like when trying to get BRD to work with Vista. May even make it more extensible for extenders.
Ok why support Bluray when less than 1% of the computer world use it? Bluray = FAIL
If the argument about antitrust applies, why are the cases not there for DVD playback, after all, these applications also provide DVD playback as standard – and in fact in MCE05, when MS didn’t provide the dvd decoder, and you had to buy nvidia’s offering – I don’t recall any anti-trust cases being raised then.
Tony