Current status?

[georgir]

I wanna ask what's ready so far and what's not... I got a verry foggy idea of it currently

From what I understand, the physical characteristics/details of the disks and the devices are completed a looooong time ago, for both Blu-Ray and for the competing HD-DVD. Its clear how they will store and read data and all, and has been so for more than a couple of years.

What's slowing them from finalising the standards then? To my knowledge, there are two aspects which aren't ready yet, but I don't think they are all that "unfinished" to be an excuse for postponing the release of Blu-ray devices and movies any further... after all we don't want HD-DVD to beat bly-ray to market, right?

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The first aspect that's not yet been decided is what codecs to use for the "standard" blu-ray video disks. It's important to standardize this aspect of the format, to avoid a situation where old players cannot playback newly-released content in the event that a new codec gets adopted later... or so it seems at first.
But think about it - choosing a predetermined set of codecs as "standard" will ALWAYS have a downside. New codecs are being developed and existing ones are improved, so there'll always be a point where you wish to expand to a "non-standard" codec.
Look at what happened to the DVD format: I think the standard calls for MPEG-2 video and PCM/AAC audio decoding functionality, but pretty much any modern player you can buy now includes support for MP3 audio, MPEG-4 variants like DivX, windows media video, etc. A lot of these players also can be expanded to future codecs by firmware updates.
Unfortunately, a lot of DVD players, especially older models, will never have support for anything more than the basic MPEG-2 codec. For that reason it's impossible to adopt WMV9 or VC-1 or MPEG-4 as a new DVD standard for releasing movies by the movie publishers - they just can't abandon such a large portion of the customers with incompatible players.

So it seems obvious to me - codec upgradeability should be a requirerment for the Blu-ray players. I think all devices will have some sort of programmable cpu in them anyway, as it's hard and/or stupid to get support for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC-1 in a non-programmable, fixed-function chip. Customers will want support for future versions of DivX and other codecs anyway, so including such upgrade-ability seems a no-brainer to me.

With such an upgradeability requirement it will be possible to launch the new format as version 1.0 with the currently decided codecs, and whenever a better option becomes available, a 2.0 version of the standard can be published and immediately be used from movie publishers without fear that old customers would be left out. They just have to download and record a small file on a disk, then they insert it in their players and viola!
It's not like that functionality would increase prices by much or anything.

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The second issue that's not been decided for blu-ray is the copyright protection it'd utilise. From what I've read, it'd be used not only for multimedia disks, but for software releases as well. Or is that so? Also there were rumors about some pretty complicated scheme involving different private keys for every different brand or model of players, so that movie companies can eventually "blacklist" certain compromised models in future releases, blahblahblah... I'm clueless how this might work, but I know one thing - either way there'll be a way around the protection. I don't understand why they're bothering at all, but oh well.
I just hope they don't waste too much time discussing this protectionand delaying the release of the format. It's important that they come up with a working version and hit the market at least as early as the HD-DVD format, else it'll be a lost fight. And they get the option to improve the protection method later in version 2.0 too, remember the upgradeable players?

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Anyway, that's my personal understanding of the current status of the format. Maybe I got it all wrong, but it seems ridiculous to me having the whole hardware side of things cleared up several years ago and still holding back the format because of software issues.
If I've messed up something, I'll gladly accept corrections

I also want to ask something here... or maybe I should create a new thread for it... oh well, here it goes
Will all blu-ray devices be able to read all layers of future disks? With blu-ray launching at max of 2 layers but the promises of at least 8 in the future, it makes me wonder.
If we get a situation where old players cannot read new disks because of the increased number of layers, its just as bad as getting a new version of the standard incompatible with the old one. So I hope that reading an arbitrary number of layers is a required ability for any devices that are gonna be released.