Blu-ray now on a Mac

[cartier]

Thought some of you might want to know.

http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/10/...blu.ray.drive/

2X Blu-Ray drive upgrade for MBPs, iMacs

Fastmac has announced a 2X Blu-Ray optical drive upgrade that is compatible with the PowerBook, iBook and MacBook Pros. The new slimline, slot loading drive can fit up to 50GB of storage on one disc. The drive supports reading, writing and re-writing to single and dual layer Blu-ray media at up to 2x speeds. The drive is also compatible with standard DVD and CD media and can write to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 8x speed in single layer and up to 2.4x speed in dual/ double layer mode. It can rewrite to DVD-R and DVD+R media at 4x speeds. The drive also supports DVD-RAM reading and writing at up to 5x speeds and standard CD-R and CD-RW burning at 8x speeds.

Blu-ray burning requires 3rd-party software such as Adobe Premiere CS3 or Roxio's Toast 8 Titanium, which enables Blu-ray disk support in the Mac OS Finder. Native support for Blu-ray burning within iLife and iTunes is expected in the future via Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

The drive is priced at $1000, carries a one year warranty and a 30 day money guarantee.

[Proteus]

They really need to dump the '2x' speeds things on these types of drives. It's very misleading.

Those numbers mean nothing, just as ghz doesn't mean squat. It's more about data throughput. They should just use the gb/sec transfer rate to measure instead. It's misleading otherwise.

Burning a BD at 2x is not 4x slower than burning a DVD at 8x from what I've experienced (given the same amount of data).

Maybe someone can post the actual data throughput numbers so we can really see how much data a BD is pushing per 'x' vs. other media.

[cpgator]

Originally Posted by cartier

The drive is priced at $1000, carries a one year warranty and a 30 day money guarantee.

Nice I actually just purchased an external BD drive for $600 today for my new Mac.

I wish Mac was a little more supportive of BD.

[blu-rayfan101]

This is good, more drives the better. Plus they should be more supportive, but mabe we should be happy with what we got.

[WriteSimply]

Are there any software players for the Mac yet? Will Apple create one?


fuad

[6ryph3n]

The new version of DVD Player in Leopard will be compatible with BD.

[whoisquilty]

Originally Posted by cpgator

I actually just purchased an external BD drive for $600 today for my new Mac.

So, which model? I have a PowerBook G4 and all I can find is the FastMac slim internal burner.

[monkeytap]

Originally Posted by whoisquilty

So, which model? I have a PowerBook G4 and all I can find is the FastMac slim internal burner.

you can save a lot of money than....i am waiting to see if apple introduces blu-ray soon otherwise i will be getting this too!

http://store.fastmac.com/product_inf...roducts_id=201

[w_tanoto]

hahahaha.... and mac user base is a lot. I am a fan of mac as well. but still use windows for all of my computer. wish I got a mac.

[aygie]

hasn't this been out for a while.......

[cpgator]

Originally Posted by whoisquilty

So, which model? I have a PowerBook G4 and all I can find is the FastMac slim internal burner.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other...ng/MRFWU25582/
It is basically the Panasonic SW-5582 in an external case.

[ESUNintel]

That's amazing. Only reason why I got a Vaio FZ was cause of the Blu-ray drive (and a few other reasons like the nvidia 8400), if not I would've gotten the SZ.

This is a pricey drive, but I sort of this want a Mac, so it might have been a determining factor. That's ok though, I like my Vaio. I hope Apple starts building Mac's with these drives build in, and they need to drop the price a bit. $600 sounds reasonable I think.

Anyone have a favorite desktop (internal) Blu-ray drive? I've been wanting to get one.