Blu-ray Disc Association sets Oct 31 deadline for hardware support of BD-Java
The Blu-ray Disc Association has announced a deadline of 31st October 2007 for all subsequent Blu-ray hardware to fully implement BD-Java functionality.
Crucially, hardware that doesn't implement this technology completely is unlikely to offer the complete range of picture-in-picture (PiP) and Internet download capabilities.
Quite why it was never a mandatory requirement from day one to have Blu-ray players fully implement BD-Java is another issue. It's another reason why early Blu-ray adopters may come unstuck with future film releases that do rely on PiP.
It's not guaranteed that a firmware upgrade is likely to fix this issue, though that will depend on the existing hardware. Part of the requirement is to have at least 256MB of persistent memory storage (1GB for Internet storage), so any players that don't have this on board will need to be upgraded.
From November, any new Blu-ray machine can only display the official logo if it conforms to the full specification, but that doesn't help anyone buying an older Blu-ray player.
Good to see that Sony is finally tightening up the requirements for the Blu-ray format. I hope they continue this trend, so that consumers are assured that BD players and media will have uniform capabilities.
Posted by: Byron LLoyd | March 28, 2007 12:54 PM