First Blu-ray disc drive won't play Blu-ray movies

By Asher Moses on 11 August 2006

Sony BWU-100A

The first Blu-ray (BD) disc drive for desktop PCs is here, but be warned -- it won't play commercial BD movies.

Sony officially announced its BWU-100A product at its "Experience More 2006" event in Sydney yesterday, all the while acknowledging that there's significant room for improvement before the product is viable for integration into media centre PCs.

Vincent Bautista, Sony's product manager for data storage, told CNET.com.au that due to copy protection issues and lagging software development, the drive will only play user-recorded high-definition content from a digital camcorder, and not commercial movies released under the BD format.

Bautista says that one of two reasons for this is the fact that commercial content is encrypted with High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), which can only be decrypted using a HDCP-compliant graphics card that offers DVI or HDMI connections. Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that support HDCP, this isn't yet possible.

The second reason, according to Bautista, is that BD playback software that can decrypt HDCP isn't "released as a saleable item yet". Today, the only HDCP-supporting BD playback application is the OEM version of Intervideo WinDVD BD that's bundled with Sony's VAIO VGN-AR18GP notebook. The AR18GP also offers an HDCP-compliant HDMI connector, which makes it capable of playing commercial movies without issue.

Bautista is optimistic that both issues will be resolved "soon", and says that despite not being able to play commercial content, the drive is still useful as a "storage device", particularly for those looking to create and distribute their own high-definition home movies on BD-R and BD-RE discs.

The Sony BWU100A has a write speed of 2x and will be available this month for AU$1399.

Editor's Note: CNET.com.au is targeted at the Australian market, so the stories published here only consider products available to Australian consumers at the time of publication.

Topics: sony, movies, hdmi, hdcp, bwu100a, ar18gp, hd-dvd, dvi, hd, definition, vaio, high, blu-ray

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Comments (38)

  • Jack Rigsbee commented on 13/02/2009 00:47 Report abuse

    I bought a Sony Blueray Player about 6 months sfter it first came out. It will not play all blu ray movies. It seams that the commonality is it will not play movies with from columbia. What can I do so that I can play all bluray movies.Other than that I love it. Please Help me $600 is a lot to pay and not be able to watch all blueray movies. I am tired of returning disk PLEASE HELP!!!

  • nilesh commented on 07/02/2009 17:02 Report abuse

    blu ray disc is very use ful to store many data and tecnology is very useful to man.

  • Terrycove commented on 04/08/2008 23:57 Report abuse

    After weeks of work with Sony support their Blue Ray equipped computers are blocked from showing movies through the HDMI cable.When you plug it in the software terminates. They won't tell you direct, you have to find out the hard way.

  • Dilip Kalal commented on 25/06/2008 23:52 Report abuse

    Blue ray disk P-3 system supported

  • 6Cra6Zy6 commented on 24/12/2007 19:29 Report abuse

    what's the point in having HD quality movies??? I guess BD players connected to TVs are different but what about the pc. with recent codecs (eg: x264), it is possible to encode movies in HD standard (1280x760) and the quality is great and file size too (300mb=22 minutes). playback is good with recent computers (a pentium 4 2.8 ghz and 1 gb ram added with an nvidia 6800 is enough)...been recording videos from tv with such standards and i can't complain!! vista is such a scam...we should boycott those stuffs!!! The 'next gen.' is not for now...life is already sh*tty today and spending loads of money on crap like that seems useless...plus in 3-4 years people will stop using them, if we start using it :)

  • tt commented on 15/12/2007 00:39 Report abuse

    I am in the same boat. My Sony double layer recorder has HDMI out and it is not even a hi-def player, but I can't connect it to a standard pc monitor with DVI input. Won't work

  • karmone01 commented on 07/11/2007 20:06 Report abuse

    do u think in the near future, with enough tuning a pc with blu ray could play ps3 games? plz someone comment back

  • Mr Correction commented on 10/07/2007 09:26 Report abuse

    Correction.... I have this drive... I even mounted it in an external USB enclosure and it plays, rips and burns blu-ray movies without a problem.

  • mitisha patel commented on 29/03/2007 19:15 Report abuse

    its nice source.

  • froggy commented on 23/03/2007 21:15 Report abuse

    Hey sticky ricky that good to hear u got it up and running with the 8800. I'm going the same path with that card, but will use the gts ilo gtx as it's a bit shorter, or maybe even wait for the 8600. sabellius, maybe your vid driver is not M$ certified for vista and so vista is blocking the hd content.

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