One Piece Online

Since the world’s largest PC manufacturer, Dell and HP are both members of BDA board, it’s very likely that the technology will be adopted as the next-generation optical disc format for PC data storage and replace technologies such as DVD±R, DVD±RW, and DVD-RAM.

The not so bright people out there had expected bluray disc and bluray player sales to skyrocket once the format war was done, but it didn’t.  And it seemed that more and more picture and motion companies are joining the Bluray wagon, trying to spur more and more people go Blu. Comparatively speaking, it takes much shorter time to transition from DVD to Bluray than VHS to DVD does, much negativity must be covered.  Think about iPhone 4 plunged into “Antennagate” and the aborted Window Vista, you will get it.

High definition video, I believe,  is in line with most consumers’ need.  Bluray, however does not make the best of it. High Definition, large capacity is great, but that is mot all.  Hare are the seven deadly sins Blu ray (including bluray disc and bluray player) had committed.

The first sin Blu-ray committed is greed.

Bluray is more expensive

Sony had won the format war and thus tries  to charge people between 50 and 100% more for a product with marginally better quality

Consequently, Bluray things, especially Bluray Player, cost much more than its competitors. It doesn’t matter, people boasting Play Station 3 would say, since PS3 can play Bluray disc.  Then what about those without a PS3?   To play the Blu ray disc, you have to spend 5 to 10 times more money on a Bluray player, which sounds like to you got to buy a Ferrari to listen to a car stereo.

The second sin is over cautiousness which produces inconvenience to bluray owners

Region Code + DRM

To protect from piracy, Blu-ray employed both region coding as well as DRM (digital rights management). The Blu-ray Disc region coding scheme divides the world into 3 regions, labeled A, B, and C.

Region A includes most North, Central and South American and Southeast Asian countries plus Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea.

Region B includes most European, African and southwest Asian countries plus Australia and New Zealand.

Region C contains the remaining central and south Asian countries, as well as China and Russia.
Region coding makes it such that movies bought from a region A (eg. USA) cannot be play on a player that is bought in region B (eg. Europe).  As for DRM Once you want to make a copy of the protected disc, problems posed and try to stop you to do that. Users making copy of the Bluray Disc for backup makes sense, but DRM is a big trouble.

The third sin of Bluray is fragility.

Data stored very close to surface of disc.

Data in the Blu-ray disc is stored very close to the surface of the disc (0.1mm) as compared to DVDs and HD DVDs (0.6mm). Scratches of more than 0.1mm will possibly damage all data stored under the scratch marks. However, various companies have come up with their own method of hard-coating the surface to make it scratch proof.

Then what about Netflix customers, scratches are almost inevitable in shipping, the only way to avoid this is to spend more money on the wrapping.  Or they might not be able to watch the Bluray movie with a hairlike crack, wasting shipping fee.

One famous feature that Bluray is proud of is the high storage capacity of 25 Gb per layer. This means large number of data can be stored onto the disc. The accompanying trouble for Bluray disk owner is how to make sure it is absolutely safe.  Frustration does not help at all once the whole movie or the entire data lost accidentally due to the fragileness or carelessness. To protect data on the costly Bluray, hard coat is not enough. The best way to make sure data is safe is to backup it on your computer or anywhere else. You’d better believe in BACKUP rather than Bluray.

In attempting to circumvent region coding restrictions, stand-alone Blu-ray Disc players are sometimes modified by third parties to allow for playback of Blu-ray Discs (and DVDs) with any region code. That is not enough, it might makes Bluray disc of different region coding can be played on one player, and it does not do away with the data safety trouble caused by the fragileness.  Well the solution is the same, make a backup. There are Bluray Rippers of various brands that are able to handle the region code as well as the DRM problem and backup it onto your computer.  Once the data is copied to your computer you are free to enjoy it without restrictions.

Jennifer Huang

Bluray discs are not that strong as it is claimed.

As it is known, Bluray has a deadly innate defect, data residing very close to the surface of Blu-ray disc. The top of the substrate is 0.1mm beneath the cover layer surface, which means the substrate itself is 1.1mm thick. A slight crack as thin as a piece of hair could be destructive, let alone a finger print which would totally be a disaster.

I appreciate and even applaud for the supreme audio/video quality presenting by Bluray discs, but I just cannot afford such a fragile technology.

Even there are companies producing hard coating for Bluray disc, such as TDK, Sony and Panasonic.  It seemed that you have to pay extra money for this remedial and awkward technology. Hard coating technology had been applied a couple of years ago, when Bluray was not as popular as today.  I bought the Bluray discs at the end of 2009, when all Bluray discs were supposed to be scratch-resistant.  But my Bluray discs are so vulnerable to scratches. The only reason I can figure out is that I didn’t pay for it.
Another proof that Bluray disc is easy to break with careless scratches is from Netfilx customers, which is the largest DVD and Bluray renting service by mailing.  Below is one of charges against the easy-to- break Bluray from a Netflix member.
“At that time… 75% of blu-ray discs I received had the crack.  Right now I’d saw about 50% of the blu-ray discs I get are cracked. It seems to be less so for newer releases, but not always. “
“Just in the past month or so, it seems every Blu-Ray disc Netflix sends me has PERMANENT PHYSICAL scratches on the “scratch proof” coating. Since the actual data is right underneath this, this of course causes playback to freeze and the disc to be unwatchable.”
On some titles, I am on my fifth attempt to get a playable title from Netflix, yet I continue to receive Blu-Ray discs with these strange scratches that render the disc unplayable. “

Jesus! You got to try 5 times or even more to get a playable Bluray disk! It suggests that 5 Bluray disks of the same movie had broken because of careless scratches!

This tweet from Netflix seems to confirm that Blu ray discs are very frail. Or Netflix is renting “old” Bluray discs without hard coatings? Or the hard coating does not resist anything at all?
Netflix have started to raise the rates on Blu-ray plans by $1 per membership which suggested Netflicks are trying to pass the cost of frequent disk replacement over to the consumers. Netflix hate this defect of fragililty a lot I bet, because it caused so many shipping back and forth for replacement which annoyed both.

Here I am not trying to attack the cutting edge Blu technology, but I am trying to say the truth and the real story happened to Bluray owners like me.

I myself have bought 30 plus Bluray Discs from Amazon since 2009, but one third of them do not work properly! Some of them freeze from time to time while playing and some others do not play at all! They cost hundreds of bucks! Sounds like a wallet vampire!
Frustration, however, does not help a thing when data lost due to tiny scratches.  Bluray disc’s easy-to-break squandered trust and expectation of so many customers like me. And we cannot put our costly movie or data at the mercy of delicate Blu thing.

To protect data on the costly Bluray discs, hard coating is just a remedial technology demanding extra payment. The best way to guard Bluray movie or data against accidental damage is to backup onto computer. I would rather believe in backup than the delicate Bluray technology.

How, you may wonder, can I backup a Bluray disc?

Well, there are Bluray Rippers of various brands available in the market.  You can get one with any search engine you prefer. The most powerful feature of a Bluray Ripper is to help you to make a full Bluray disc copy to your computer without any quality loss.  Even if your Bluray disk damaged you can still enjoy the movie with Power DVD after you created ISO images with the files you have backed up on your computer.