Just as a matter of interest....at $199 from OfficeWorks, portable downloads using a USB 2 harddrive or a pen drive is that much closer technology wise.

This very flexible Media Centre from WD may be indicative of some not-so-distant planning towards portable downloads if Blu-ray continues as it has .

Certainly the movie industry can cater for both, optical for permanent storage, harddrives/pen drives for portable (time limited) downloads, even internet movie downloads.

http://www.officeworks.com.au/technology/d...WDAVP00BP.shtml

http://www.wdtv.com.au/about.html


just a typical duplicator .....

http://www.nexcopy.com/

C.M

Nearly bought one today but O/S...

But look HERE..!!

Thanks Joz, I'm rarely in that section so I completely missed the thread.

So will continue from that thread. Cheers.

C.M

Umm The Dark Knight Blu-ray is on its way to selling 1,000,000 units worldwide (600k first day), which accounts for 20% of all sales of this title. DVD took ages before it had a million seller. Like it or lump it Blu is here to stay. And if you're holding out for the much touted HD on demand via downloading with all the spunk of 1080p & HD audio that we currently enjoy then don't hold your breath.

Well for a start Blu-ray has been going now for something like 3 years and it still has barely made a dent in DVD sales worldwide. The truth is, if people don't like a movie whether they rent it or having seen it in a movie theatre they simply won't buy it whether it be on a DVD or as a 'spit and polished' Blu-ray version of it. But, if they thought it was not that bad a movie they might just buy it for someone else in the DVD discount sales..... but certainly not on the Blu-ray format at those exorbitant prices.

Disc prices are the bane of the Blu-ray format and little will change while that is the case.

Really, a projected 1,000,000 BR copies sold for a big movie production such as this is laughable when one compares that figure against typical DVD sales worldwide.

My actual reference to 'downloads' was to that of 'portable downloads' not of internet downloads. Practical ' internet downloads' of the BR movie calibre is at least 20 years away in this country and would require something in the order of 25 M/Bytes/sec (200 Mbits/sec) download speed to even compete with the write speed of one of these small,portable WD harddrives attached to this Media (Centre) Player.

Something like 'Iron Man' ....at 47.25 Gigs (which includes extras) would only take 31.5 minutes to download (at 25 M/Bytes/sec...typical ) on one of these little WD drives so they do offer a practical alternative if adopted.

Typical HD movies are around the 32 Gig size (no extras) which would only take 21.3 minutes to download from a 'video outlet PC', so these Media Players may prove to be a popular alternative to the optical disc player in years to come for rentals.
It depends on the Studios if they will license video store downloadable rentals.

Anyway, enough has been said on this subject in times past and wishing not to have to go through it again, we'll just have to wait and see what happens in the next few years as the technology advances.

C.M


typo's edited.

Wow! what if I only have a 4gb download limit??

no download limit on portable downloads.

If your talking legally then your probably right, however if your talking illegally then that day is already here. There is already 1080p mkv's with HD audio that you can download.