BD player with USB connection?

[Mr_Sukebe]

Here's a question for you guys.
Do any of the existing or planned BD players have a USB connection, allowing the connection of a hard drive for video streaming from disk? Did occur that a BD player might be capable of having an MS HD-DVD drive connected to it, thus making it about the first multi-format player.

Thoughts?

[nehalem]

PS3 probably the only one at the moment.

[Bald Monkey]

And then you'd have to install a HD-DVD software player on the linux installed on the PS3, if such software even exists, which I doubt.. as the HD-DVD addon for the 360 is just a drive.

It would probably be far easier and cheaper to make a dual format PC based player.

[Rasczak]

Originally Posted by Bald Monkey

It would probably be far easier and cheaper to make a dual format PC based player.

Much easier - especially as dual format playback software now exists. It wouldn't be cheap though - you'll pay around £300 for the BluRay drive and half that again for a HD DVD drive.

It would be quite amusing to see the PS3 running HD DVD though

[Ian_S]

Originally Posted by Mr_Sukebe

Here's a question for you guys.
Do any of the existing or planned BD players have a USB connection, allowing the connection of a hard drive for video streaming from disk? Did occur that a BD player might be capable of having an MS HD-DVD drive connected to it, thus making it about the first multi-format player.

Thoughts?

It's a very common misconception that somehow the BD and HD-DVD file-structures and associated operating software have anything in common. They don't. Unlike DVD where DVD+ and DVD- were simply different ways to write a DVD compatible disc, but if you wanted a film on there you used one menu structure and file layout, with BD/HD-DVD there is little common ground.

Whilst they use the same filesystem on disc, UDF 2.5, and share the same video and audio codecs, the similarities drop off pretty quickly after that. Even the way the audio is encoded differs for what looks like the same codec. For example, a DD 640kbps track on BD is not playable on HD-DVD. An HD-DVD 1.5 Mbps DD+ 5.1 track is not playable on BD. Dolby TrueHD is encoded completely differently between BD and HD-DVD, with the BD version providing a legacy compatible core 640Kbps DD stream whilst the HD-DVD version does not...

HD-DVD uses it's own directory structure and HDi for control of menus, mixing etc, BD has several menu structures, BDAV, BDMV and BDJ depending on the disc type and uses Java for control etc...

HD-DVD discs are encrypted with AACS, BD uses AACS as well as something called BD+, so chances are even if the audio/video stream was the same and even resided in the same place on disc, an HD-DVD player would not be able to decrypt BD+ successfully as it knows nothing about it. I don't know if BD supports the use of AACS without BD+...

I have no doubt that the first thing we will see will be a PC drive that can either read or perhaps read and write to both formats by use of some clever multi-focus laser assembly, but then a lot of software work has to go into effectively running two operating systems with different decoding (for everything but video) in one operating environment. So yes PC's are the first place where this will all gel together, but getting that on silicon that operates quickly and reliably will take a bit more time yet, especially as both formats are still shaking out the problems in their own respective systems.

The difference this time round from DVD is that the pace that these problems appear to be being looked at is faster. However that doesn't seem to be making it any easier to predict when we might see them. Ricoh announced early this year that they had a design for a laser assembly that would focus on both HD-DVD and BD media, yet so far no sign of it in any product.