On February 13, 2008 8:56:32 AM EST, Tim Goeke <
email@hidden> wrote:
There's another compelling issue that makes Java more relevant than ever, and that's BD-J.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J)
Since it seems that Blue-Ray has all but crushed HD-DVD, what are all those new titles being developed in?
Actually, according to a Sun speaker at Mobile & Embedded Developer Days, only a tiny fraction of the existing Blu-Ray titles use BD-J. Most use the simpler, DVD-like HDMV scripting.
Worse, every Blu-Ray session I've gone to has actually acknowledged severe cross-player compatibility problems with BD-J. And the demos of the technology so far have only shown off fancier menus and extremely trifling games. At MEDDs, they showed the Surf's Up disc's pinball game, a 2D trifle that isn't even up to contemporary standards for Flash games.
I'm starting to equate BD-J with Gertrude Stein's famous comment about L.A.: there's no there there.
If Apple is the content king (and they are), how should they respond to a huge shift in the industry with the victory of BD and the death of HD-DVD? It seems that Apple would want to be in on the content creation game, and that means staying current with Java.
Video authors will probably be perfectly happy to create the media assets for Blu-Ray discs with high-end tools like Final Cut Pro, Logic, etc. Does Apple need to get into the tool market for Blu-Ray, when the format's sponsor (Sony) and others already have their own tools? When the number of developers is limited by the fact that the Blu-Ray Disc Association keeps out "tire kickers" and indie developers with high license fees? I'm not seeing a market there.
The latest crop of video cameras are HD. BD drives are getting cheaper. By next year, consumers will expect iMovie to be able to create BD movies with all their HD content.
Maybe so, but does iDVD let you author your own DVD interactivity? Of course not. A Blu-Ray equivalent to iDVD would presumably use canned HDMV scripts, and end-users would just be authoring their own media assets.
Apple might develop a Blu-Ray authoring environment analogous to DVD Studio Pro, but they might be waiting for the format to get more boxes in homes. And even then, if >95% of current authors are choosing HDMV, it's entirely possible they wouldn't worry about providing BD-J authoring.
PS I'm pretty tempted to get a BD drive just so I can make my own HD movies!
I fear you'll be disappointed with the difficulty of getting bits on the disc. You can try. Check out <
https://hdcookbook.dev.java.net> for a small but active BD-J community. Seems like the viable approaches right now are a) copying an existing disc and mimicking its format, b) paying the BDA $15,000 to become a licensee. No, I'm not kidding about (b).
PPS What happens when people go HD crazy? They start working with huge files, and pretty soon they need a bigger computer. Say, like a new Mac Pro. There is going to be an HD content creation revolution, and people are going to need software and hardware to make it happen.
Who says the HD content revolution is going to happen on shiny little discs? There's this thing called the internet, see...
