PS4 and XB1 "Game Consoles" as home Media Servers in Playready 3 notes

[jeff_rigby]

Originally Posted by Mavrick

This is what happens when there's no competition.

Back then Sony faced a battle with the HD-DVD camp so had to pull out all the stops which meant making the PS3 the best cheapest (at the time) option not only for gamers but AV enthusiasts. They saw how PS2 put 100,000s of DVD players in to homes the world over and PS3 was their best bet for BD.

They took huge losses by doing so but it won them the war.

This time around there is no competition, no risks as such since no one is going to come along and steal away billions of dollars by having a rival format win out.

In a way it's better for us since we don't have to go through the drama of another format war. But at the same time the lack of a competing format might not exactly inspire companies to go all out.

Did some research and I have some supported speculation:

The BDA knew what the disk specs for 4K blu-ray would be in 2010.

Modern Blu-ray drives can support 4K blu-ray There is a 2010 patent from Sony which confirms modern blu-ray drives can support 4k blu-ray. The patent discusses a modification to either the coming 4 layer BDXL in the 2010 blu-ray whitepaper or 3 layer 4K blu-ray disks to make them unreadable on older blu-ray drives by inverting the track information. A software change to later higher spec standard blu-ray drives makes them able to read this inverted track information.

For example, if a new version of the Blu-ray Disc that incorporates a multi-layer structure of at least three layers (hereinafter called the Ver. 2.0 disc) becomes commercially available in the future, it could happen that a user would load a Ver. 2.0 disc into a Ver. 1.0 drive.

Basically, because the Blu-ray Disc format is the same, recording and playing back a Ver. 2.0 disc on a Ver. 1.0 drive would not be absolutely impossible. However, if the Ver. 2.0 disc is achieved by using higher density and more layers, it can be assumed that the various types of specifications with which the Ver. 1.0 drive is provided would not the adequate. So a change to the specs of a blu-ray drive would make it usable for 4K. That's what the 2010 blu-ray BD-R whitepaper was all about. They had from 2010 to do this. Sometime after 2010 modern drives could read 4 layer BDXL which means the could easily read 3 Layer commercial disks.

Therefore, in a case where recording and playback of a Ver. 2.0 disc are done on a Ver. 1.0 drive, there is concern that recording errors and playback errors would occur with greater frequency.

This patent is from 2010 is either about the coming 4 layer BDXL disks or 3 layer 4K and may show that the 3 layer with the 2010 Panasonic-Sony tweak was KNOWN at that time in 2010 to be future 4K blu-ray disk. If it's about coming standard blu-ray drives able to read 4 layers then they can read 3 layer 4K disks. The following cite shows that production equipment to make such a disk was shipping late 2013 which means the standard was known much earlier.

Singulus Develops Technology for 100 GB, 4K Triple-Layer Blu-Ray Discs in 2013

1) A 4K drive has to read 1080P blu-ray disks...
2) The disk standard for 4K was known prior to 2013 when production machines were shipping for those disks
3) Sony was involved in setting the disk standard.
4) The PS4 did not ship till Nov 2013
5) Only the 4K blu-ray format and specs were undecided till this year...I.E. parts that can be firmware updated.

Originally Posted by https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=256623

I've been informed that PC's will not require new Blu-ray drives to playback 4k media/bluray. PC's will only need software that supports 4K (PowerDVD 14 already does this). So we have it then....

Think about what this means, Windows 8 OEM PCs upgraded with Windows 10 or Older PCs with relatively new AMD or Nvidia dGPUs, XB1 and PS4 can support 4K blu-ray with firmware update.[/QUOTE]The attractive feature will be the digital bridge legal copies and streaming of HD (1080p) and UHD (4k) media in the home.