Mac has Blu-ray envy in Microsoft ad

You can watch Blu Ray movies on a Mac it just involves waiting and consumption of battery life if you're on a plane but this can be done getting on your flight/traveling.
1. Insert Blu Ray Disc into Disc Drive
2. Rip movie with Handbrake.
3. Watch using VLC or Quicktime with Perian plug-ins.

Am I the only one who would love to burn 25-50 GB on a single disc?

I can plug in my machine for said hypothetical burning sessions. No big deal.

You can actually put an aftermarket Blu-Ray drive in a Mac Pro.
There aren't a whole bunch of apps that support playback.
But you can get it working. It works great.

I can be the biggest Mac fanboy there is, but the lack of Blu-Ray support is embarrassing.

I don't actually have any machine that plays Blu-Ray. But recently I have been noticing something on DVDs: extra contents are less and less. Which is unfortunate. Blu-Ray is getting the love.

I am sure Blu-Ray gives awesome HD experience yet, I think physical disc is getting really old. I use to collects DVDs and CDs, but 10 years later, all those are getting cluttered. It's nice to have big library, but I am noticing that few of those DVDs and CDs are broken and no longer readible.

Now, in relation to PC vs Mac on Blu-Ray optical capability, I reckon if you can watch the HD quality without optical, it's good enough.

To correct a few things:
Unless WIndows 7 has released a SP that I haven't seen yet, it cannot natively playback Blu-Ray discs; you would need a driver.

Blu-Ray was also invented for the home/movie theater environment; not for playback on a plane, sitting at the bus terminal, or my personal favorite "jury duty". When people spend $150+ on a BR player and $20+ on a BR disc, they're looking for the UNCOMPRESSED audio and video - hence why you need a 1080p set and an HDMI cable to accomplish this.

As far as the envy over BR, it was a money thing on Sony's end to win the war. Had Toshiba won the war with HD-DVD, it would have become a standard; movies would have been released EITHER with a resolution of 720x480 (DVD resolution) or 1280x720 (HD and HD-DVD resolutions) - which I believe is also what iPads and ATV support.

Quick note: My resolutions are based on NTSC, I don't know the PAL conversions.

I agree with Ari - I'd rather playback movies on my hard drive (less parts and more battery life) than have to rely on discs and an optical drive. Sure, physical media is forever, but with a good backup plan, so's a portable hard drive :-D

Liquidmark, judging by how you respond to other people's comments, I can tell that you are a zealot. Let me just get a couple of things across to you:

At this point in time, the most legitimate way to get 1080p content is through blu-ray. Unless your only entertainment device is a macbook (1280x800 at that apparently for you) and you care about image and sound, you'd probably buy a blu-ray disk. My argument is, why not give people the option to watch blu-ray on their macbooks as well.

"Scott, I can carry 50 movies on my hard drive with digital distribution. I don't care about 720p vs 1080p when using a laptop on a flight. In fact, DVD is just fine if I *must* use a disk, which I don't do, because I rip all my dvd's anyway."

The argument here assumes that you already own the blu-ray disks for another reason. I am not arguing saying you should buy blu-ray content for your macbook pro, no i'ms aying if you own it because of your high-def system, you'd like the OPTION (yes I said option in the first post) to play it on your macbook pro as well.

"There is a huge difference between the infinitesimally small battery life hit you take with a processor upgrade and very noticeable one that you take when you run a Blu-Ray. Hell, there's a huge difference between DVD and Blu-Ray in that regard."

This is an absolute lie. A processor upgrade is not infinitesimallys mall battery life. In fact, when playing HD content, no matter from a blu-ray drive or straight off your Harddrive, you're using ur processor and/or graphic card and you bet it'll shave a good 30 minute off your battery life. In fact, when i search for comparisons between DVD drive and Blu-Ray drive battery life, i can't find a single article saying blu-ray drives suck more power. I'm led to believe that it definitely needs more power, but it's not a significant difference. It's actually because a blu-ray palyer requires much more of your computer resources (processing,graphics) and that explains the power difference.

This leads me to a second point. The reason macbooks have better battery life is because of the battery technology. Apple designed rectangular batteries which takes up the volume not taken up by spherical batteries thus giving you more juice in the same volume of space. PC's dont which is why you prpobably can't finish AVATAR on a PC, but not because it's played off a blu-ray instead of DVD.

Your last comment is kind of odd. I made the comment about connecting it to a TV because people are saying that they're using their pC Blu-ray drives as their blu-ray player. If your 1280x800 is your only resolution than by all means, keep downloading. If you have a HD TV, than a 1280x720p movie has only 40% of the pixel density as a 1920x1080p Blu-Ray movie. That's a lot. As I said, you seem like a consumer that doens't care about your hi-def fidelity so arguing is kind of moot.

This is one of the areas that really ticks me off. Everyone seems to be saying that discs are dead, and it's just not true. They aren't as important as they used to be, but as long as we need a high quality and universally compatible option for audio and video discs are vital. It's not like Blu-ray has to fail for streaming video to succeed. Yet it's being treated like that. Blu-ray is an important upgrade to DVDs and should be supported!

Oh so which Windows laptop will play all of Avatar on Blu-Ray on battery power?

Mac Owners are such a hilarious group. Let me be the first to say that Blu-Ray will always be an option and not a standard. I feel like people are basically saying "I have a blu-ray player in my living room, why should I have one on my laptop as well?" Well the reason being is that people would like the option of buying one. Life is all about options, but you people don't seem to realize that and are against it because your mighty Steve Jobs told you it's not necessary.

Live your life for yourself minions. True, Blu-Ray players add cost and battery life problems, but so does that processor upgrade Apple offers. No need to discriminate here. And I don't believe people can't tell the difference between a DVD player and a Blu-Ray player. That's outrageous. A DVD's resolution is around 720x480. Your resolution is at least 1280x800 and a Blu-Ray is 1920x1080. There is definitely a resolution difference and if you can't tell the difference, I don't know how to help you.

Also, does nobody else notice that the alternative problem is that your harddrive will be encumbered by these large movies? Streaming HD is in the future, not in the present. You won't always have a stable internet connection for it and then you're stuck with needing a large harddrive instead of getting something like a SSD.