August 12th, 2006
Smart Move #1: First Blu-ray PC Drive Won’t Play Blu-ray Movies
By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
Here’s a good idea: a Blu-ray drive for PCs, the first in fact, and it won’t play Blu-ray movies. The drive, the BWU-100A, was announced at Sony’s “Experience More 2006″ event in Sydney. There are some legitimate reasons for this, but that doesn’t mean this drive will sell very well with this limitation.
(Vincent) Bautista (Sony’s product manager for data storage) 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. Source: C|Net AU
We Say: I see why the limitation exists, but despite that, many won’t, and you can bet this will just add to the Sony-bashing going on. 
John Corliss says:
I’ve totally boycotted Sony products at this point. Their products are unreliable and their business decisions are those of an idiot. Sony is an idea who’s time has gone.
August 13th, 2006 at 2:29 am
Mark says:
Now Sony is even screwing themselves with all these attempts at copy protection; And it still won’t do a damn thing to slow down the pirates.
August 14th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
bryan says:
lets see how long a firmware hack fixes this issue, when will people realize that for every copyright protection created there is always a hack. always. as long as humans are makeing ways to keep things secret there will alwys be those who find ways to get what they want
June 29th, 2007 at 10:39 am