Blu-ray Basics: Using The High-Definition DVD Format On Your PCBlu-ray Basics: Using The High-Definition DVD Format On Your PC

Now that the war between HD-DVD and Blu-ray is over and PC makers are adding Blu-ray as a regular option with new systems, people are asking: What's the big win with Blu-ray?

Obviously it's being pushed as the next big way to get your hi-def entertainment fix. But it also comes with copy-protection strings attached which may make it a tough fruit to tear into on the PC side. And while it promises up to 50-Gbytes per disc (and potentially more than that), that much storage also comes at a premium cost.

To help answer your questions, here's a review of how Blu-ray shapes up in two key areas in the PC world: in overall content delivery and as a data storage medium.

Video Playback And Copy Protection

The application most commonly associated with Blu-ray is, of course, high-definition video. In order to deliver high-def video reliably, though, Blu-ray (also called BD) requires a whole ecosystem of components: the drive itself, the playback software, the discs themselves, and a video card and display that support certain standards.

In short, it's the sort of investment that's probably best made when buying a whole new system, since some of the pieces (like the video card) require the newest possible hardware. Cyberlink, makers of PowerDVD, one of the most widely-used high-def playback programs, offers an advisor application that can poll your system and determine what's up to snuff and what needs replacing.

As with conventional DVD, you'll need standalone software (typically not included with your operating system) to play back HD video on a PC. Most Blu-ray drives will come bundled with such a program, although the feature set available through the program will vary widely.

My own Dell XPS PC came with an OEM edition of PowerDVD named PowerDVD DX, which bears little resemblance to PowerDVD itself, but is compliant with a player standard known as a "profile" (in this case, profile 1.1).

One feature that is consistently missing from all programs that perform Blu-ray playback, as bizarre as this sounds, is the ability to save screenshots from a content-protected movie. This functionality was deliberately removed to prevent the bootlegging of Blu-ray titles by making frame-by-frame copies of the film. Such a measure sums up a good deal of the ire directed at Blu-ray: digital rights management.

The layers of protection, provided by both the authors of the Blu-ray content and the creators of the hardware and software used to play it back, have been the subject of great criticism on many fronts -- not simply because (in the opinion of the critics) it's only a matter of time before these protections are circumvented, but because they create about as many problems as they solve. It's entirely possible to watch Blu-ray titles on a PC without ever running afoul of its DRM -- many people do -- but it's worth spelling out under what circumstances it can be prohibitive. Two kinds of protection can be implemented through Blu-ray: copy protection and content protection. The former makes it difficult to duplicate the physical media itself. The latter makes it difficult to copy or divert the video content delivered from the media.

Blu-Ray For Data Storage?

The possibilities for Blu-ray as a data storage medium for the PC were obvious long before anyone speculated about whether it or HD-DVD would be the preferred high-definition on-disc delivery medium. The main question now is: is it worth the price? And how reliable is it?

The first and most major outlay of cash is, of course, for the drive itself, and right now the least expensive Blu-ray burner drives weigh in at something like $400. NewEgg.com features a Lite-On model for that much; Sony's own Blu-ray disc burner comes in at a wallet-shredding $600.

The question isn't whether or not the costs will come down on these drives -- they will -- but whether they'll come down in a timely enough way and to enough of a price point that it wouldn't simply be more economical to buy one or more external hard drives to get the same storage space at a better price premium. Then there's the question of the cost of blank media. At NewEgg.com, a blank single-layer (25-Gbyte) Blu-ray disc costs anywhere from $10 to $14, depending on which manufacturer you choose. A dual-layer (50-Gbyte) disc is only around $16, so if your drive can write to dual-layer media, there's little point in buying single-layer discs since you can double the capacity for only a few dollars more.

This works out to about $0.32 a gigabyte. (Not all drives burn to dual-layer BD media, which is another gotcha.) There's also the possibility that future iterations of writeable BD media could contain more than just two layers (Sony has talked repeatedly about 200-Gbyte discs being a possibility), but there's no guarantee such discs would be compatible with existing players.

At current market prices, assume $600 for a dual-layer drive and $16 for each piece of 50-Gbyte media. Compare that to a 500-Gbyte SATA hard drive from Western Digital, which retails for $100 -- that's $0.20 per gigabyte. To get the same price per gigabyte for BD, you'd have to discount the cost of the drive entirely (for instance, if you were buying it anyway as part of a system) and have blank dual-layer media drop to $10 a pop.

On the plus side, a BD drive means being able to add storage in 25 to 50-Gbyte increments without having to buy a whole new drive. It's in many ways a redux of the same dilemmas that cropped up when DVD and CD drives themselves first appeared.

BD-Compatible Burning Software

When it comes to the software used to burn data to Blu-ray discs, the good news is that support for BD burning has crept into most popular CD/DVD burning packages over the past year. A new BD drive will typically ship with software of its own for writing to BD, but even many freeware programs now support burning to BD. The popular burning suite Nero, for instance, writes to Blu-ray discs natively, and the freeware application ImgBurn (a favorite of mine) is also BD-aware. Linux users are not out in the cold, either: Nero's Linux edition supports BD burning, and some open source tools also exist to do the same. (Many popular burning suites also now support video authoring in HD to boot.)

Longevity And Reliability Of Media

A question that remains unresolved in many people's minds is the longevity and reliability of the media. Because Blu-ray is still new and relatively untested, and because there are already concerns about the longevity of burned CDs and DVDs, people may be understandably reluctant to commit irreplaceable data to them. I have read claims to the effect that BD-R/RE media can last for 30 to 50 years under "ideal conditions," but again, given how new the format is, that sounds like shooting in the dark. To that end, don't trust the only copy of anything you have to a Blu-ray disc -- but then again, that's probably a good rule of thumb about any backup media.

Another question that's been asked a great deal: Are discs still a worthy content delivery method in an age of increasing bandwidth? The short answer seems to be yes. For one, a manufactured disc tends to be far more durable and persistent than downloaded content, which you'd need to restore from a backup or tediously re-download if something goes wrong. Also, while there may be more bandwidth to go around, it's still generally less onerous to have 50 Gbytes delivered to you on disk than it is to pull it down from the Internet at large, BitTorrent or not -- and that probably won't change any time soon for most people.

Conclusions

Despite the boom in popularity Blu-ray has enjoyed as of late against its immediate rival, it's still a niche format in more ways than one. It's not going to displace conventional DVD, either as a content carrier or a data-storage medium, for a while yet -- with "a while" being calibrated in years, not months.

Unless you're determined to watch Blu-ray-exclusive content on the PC, it's a luxury option and not a requirement. It will probably remain that way until Blu-ray titles begin selling in numbers that stack up in a major way against conventional DVD -- which, by all accounts, still has a good, long lifespan.