James Delahunty
5 Oct 2005 14:49
An Intel executive has said the company would consider also supporting Blu-Ray if the Blu-Ray Disc Association would promise that content stored on Blu-Ray discs could be transfered to home multimedia servers without complications or issues. This "Mandatory Managed Copy" ensures that consumers will be able to copy content directly from a disc to a home server where it could be accessed from around the home and can be copied and viewed on a portable device.
The HD-DVD camp has already committed to this feature in the upcoming format developed by Toshiba. Vice President and general manager of Intel’s digital home group, Donald McDonald, said that the interests of consumers were being ignored while the two formats battle it out to become a standard in the market for high definition material and next generation video games.
Intel generally stays neutral in disputes over upcoming technology so its decision last week to support HD-DVD (along with Microsoft) was a surprise. Whatever format the company has backed, it is of course going to make hardware compatible with both. The company for now is just looking to give support to whichever format is more consumer friendly, hopefully that will turn out to be both formats.
"The reason we provided support for HD-DVD is that basically it has committed to several features. Specifically, the mandatory managed copy," said McDonald. He also left a message for the Blu-Ray camp. "We have not heard an unequivocal statement from the Blu-ray camp to say that you’ll be able to have mandatory managed copy without any kind of complications and any kind of issues. So we could be thrilled if they were able to deliver a similar commitment," McDonald said. "The opportunity is for Blu-ray to unequivocally commit to having exactly the same consumer friendly features."
Source:
Macworld