Quote:
Originally Posted by HDTV1080P
Yes that is true 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray players launched in 2016. I was just stating a fact that there are many BDXL drives from 2015-2022 that will not read 4K Bu-ray discs. Pioneer appears to have went 100% BDXL computer drives around November of 2022, and only four of those 2022 models work with 4K Blu-ray discs, many of the modern-day Pioneer BDXL drives made in 2022 according to the specs do not read 4K Blu-ray discs. But all this is a non-issue since in November 2023 no company offers software anymore to playback 4K Blu-ray discs on a Windows PC.
This thread in theory will die and the remaining PowerDVD 17 through 22 Ultra owners will just go out and buy a standalone 4K Blu-ray player or switch to 4K Ultra HD streaming from Netflix, Amazon or another provider.
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My main concern was for UHD Blu-ray as a
portable format like DVD was. Here's what I believe is why it failed in this regard, unlike DVD.
Back when DVD first came out, computer hard drives could barely hold the entire contents of a DVD (8.5 GB). The largest hard drive available at the time (1997) was a 16 GB drive, and most computers weren't going to ship with such an expensive drive. Mind you, this was the largest
desktop (3.5") hard drive, and assuming you didn't store anything else on it, you'd barely be able to fit more than 2 DVD movies assuming they take up most of a disc's space. I can't find much data as to what the largest
laptop (2.5") hard drive was, but the late 1998 PowerBook G3 in its highest spec was the first Apple laptop to ship with a DVD drive and playback (which was so demanding it ran through a dedicated decoder card) and shipped with an 8 GB hard drive.
Internet connections were nowhere near fast enough to carry the bitrate of DVD-Video (up to about 8 Mbps.) Anyone who streamed video off the Internet, even slightly later than this, will remember just how terrible it looked (much worse than even the consumer analog videotape systems.) Just so you know, Warner Bros. still has the
website for the 1996 film
Space Jam up and running to this day so you can see what browsing the web would have been like in the 90s. So, because of this, DVD was pretty much the only means by which you could watch decent-quality feature-length films on your laptop.
Fast forward to when Blu-ray came out. 3.5" hard drives had just hit 750 GB and 2.5" hard drives had just hit 200 GB, with most computers shipping with much smaller drives. Internet streaming services would only launch just slightly later, and I would suspect there is a large quality difference between early streaming and modern streaming, and there was a much more limited selection compared to now. Still, it would be decent enough for most people, and for playing physical discs, most still found DVD good enough for casual laptop viewing. However, at least there were enough that wanted to be able to watch Blu-ray Discs on their laptop that companies (aside from Apple) would ship some higher-end laptops with Blu-ray drives and playback software. They even made some standalone portable Blu-ray players.
Now when we get to Ultra HD Blu-ray, the difference in resolution was not immediately noticeable, especially on a laptop-sized screen. There was, of course, the HDR factor, but at that point streaming services had grown to offer a much larger selection and started including HDR on some of the streams. While HDR can look amazing when you see it, there was (and still is) nothing wrong with SDR, especially for casually viewing a movie. Even without HDR, today's streaming and digital downloads still very much beat DVD in terms of quality. The overwhelming majority of consumers saw (and still see) no reason to pursue any additional quality for laptop viewing at this point, and almost all who purchased UHD Blu-ray discs were (and still are) perfectly content with relegating them to their home AV equipment as it can take much better advantage of the format's potential. As a result, only very few consumers would purchase a UHD Blu-ray drive and software to play the discs on their laptop. The only laptop I am aware of to ship with a UHD Blu-ray drive is the VAIO S15 (9th Gen Intel) that is only available in Japan. If playing UHD Blu-ray discs on computers had become much more widespread than it did, then we would probably already have a way of playing these aside from SGX as there would have been enough demand for the companies to feel it worthwhile to develop such a solution. Of course, if the companies do end up deciding to surprise us like Disney did when it announced we would be getting discs for
The Mandalorian, I will definitely be on board. I always wonder how much better the technology world could have been if there had been a much larger uptake on every new format that came out (like Video8 as a home TV recording format in the late 80s,
DV as a home TV recording format in the late 90s, DVD-RAM as removable computer storage in the late 90s to early 2000s, etc.)
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