With the discontinuation of HD-DVD player production, Blu-ray has decisively won as the standard for high-definition video. Despite some initial hopes that Blu-ray would make its debut at Macworld San Francisco, Apple still has not yet committed to shipping Blu-ray drives in their machines.

Blu-ray is expected to first arrive in their Mac Pro models, but notebook owners may have to wait a little longer before they are adopted in MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Wired explores the battery drain a standard Blu-ray drive imposes on a notebook and claims that some of the 1st generation Blu-ray notebooks could only play a movie 1/2 way through before draining their notebook's battery.

The situation is no longer as grim, with the Blu-ray Disc Association claiming the situation has been resolved and some laptops now able to play 2 Blu-ray movies back-to-back on a single charge. Beyond the pure power draw of the Blu-ray drive itself, the additional processing to decode the Blu-ray video was contributing to the additional battery drain. One of the solutions has been the ability to offload this decoding to modern video cards.

Related Forums: MacBook, MacBook Pro

Popular Stories

google drive for desktop1

Google to Roll Out New 'Drive for Desktop' App in the Coming Weeks, Replacing Backup & Sync and Drive File Stream Clients

Tuesday July 13, 2021 1:18 am PDT by
Earlier this year, Google announced that it planned to unify its Drive File Stream and Backup and Sync apps into a single Google Drive for desktop app. The company now says the new sync client will roll out "in the coming weeks" and has released additional information about what users can expect from the transition. To recap, there are currently two desktop sync solutions for using Google...