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

Related Articles

Comments (43)

  • Michael commented on 16/12/2009 00:26

    yes but why would any of you buy this if you had a normal market computer, what use is it too you a normal market computer is gonna be bad quality anyway, i got one right away and it was perfect, i do however have and above market custom rig, but nether less bad idea to buy if u only spent 500 on ur computer ^^

  • Haru commented on 24/11/2009 11:25

    When ever i try to play my blu-ray disk it says windows 7 color thingy has been changed and then an error pops up telling me to go to www.cyberlink.com/BDUpdate and it will update my Blu-ray but really it did a system check and has not helped at all. saying im missing the system player or w/e...um...help!?

  • shamoo commented on 14/11/2009 08:31

    i love this so cool.

  • mick t commented on 05/09/2009 21:06

    i am trying to watch spiderman 3
    on my vaio vgn-ar51m laptop
    it played before but won't play now a window comes up sometimes
    and says windows vista is in basic mode colour problem help

  • jchap100321 commented on 09/08/2009 16:34

    Most Blu ray discs willnot play now that Microsoft rolled everything back to 3.1 Installer so your Blu ray is back to atapi setting and will not run Blu ray but will run the Digital DVDs.

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

    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

    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

    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

    Blue ray disk P-3 system supported

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

    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 :)

Post your own comment

You must read and type the 6 chars within 0..9 and A..F

You must read and type the 6 chars within 0..9 & A..F

Submit

Enter your personal information to the left, or sign in with your Facebook account by clicking the button below.

Connect

The Explain Series

Must read

Popular Phones & Plans

Powered by WhistleOut

1) Apple iPhone 3GS 32GB36 plans 2%
2) Apple iPhone 3GS 16GB36 plans 1%
3) Nokia N9743 plans 2%
4) Nokia 5800 XpressMusic43 plans 1%
5) Sony Ericsson Satio14 plans 1%
Three Vodafone
« 1 of »
1) Apple mobile phones 1%
2) Nokia mobile phones 7%
3) Sony Ericsson mobile phones 3%
4) Blackberry mobile phones 3%
5) Samsung mobile phones 1%

Compare: Mobiles | Broadband

CNET Australia Partner Services