Vista To Support HD DVD Playback (Not Blu-ray)

Vista to directly support HD DVD; Blu-ray to come from 3rd parties

PICCOLA GADGETS — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 00:46:11 GMT

We were pretty surprised last week when an unnamed Microsoft spokesperson declared that Windows Vista would include &quot;a great HD DVD and Blu-ray DVD experience.&quot; The statement, after all, seemed inconsistent with Microsoft's previous position tha

re: Vista To Support HD DVD Playback (Not Blu-ray)

MikeA — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 18:32:39 GMT

Good move...Not having to find and install a seperate decoder application will save many people from the configuration and setup issues present in Windows XP Media Center.

Having it work right out-of-the-box will go a long way towards customer satisfaction.

re: Vista To Support HD DVD Playback (Not Blu-ray)

chrisl — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 16:09:42 GMT

Deocoding the video is the easy part, but Brian your correct about the interactive layer. HD DVD will use iHD and support will be built in Vista. BD on the other hand uses BD-J which is based on Java. Support for this will only come from third parties. The other (large) problem for BD is going to be BD+. Vista will do AACS just fine, but adding BD+ on top will also be left to third parties. Both of those issues might seem rather small, but they are actually very complicated.

re: Vista To Support HD DVD Playback (Not Blu-ray)

Brian Hoyt — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 16:04:13 GMT

Since both are using the same codecs (VC-1, MPEG-2&4) isn't the hurdle from a licensing standpoint met by supporting one? Supporting decoding of the core movie material should be almost trivial. I guess the interactive layer may be more cumbersome supporting between the two.

re: Vista To Support HD DVD Playback (Not Blu-ray)

Griffon — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 04:05:14 GMT

Vista will invairable support both, it just might be a bit before it's a certifed MS generic driver vs Toshibas or whoevers beta driver running the show, hardly a big deal I suspect.