The BeoVision 7 MkIV is not released in the US yet. We're looking at June at this point. I assume the replacement drive will be available at about the same time.

I wasn't aware the BV7 MkIV was available anywhere yet to be honest. 

I'm in the UK. Had placed an order for the BV7 in December with an estimated delivery of mid-Feb. My dealer then advised me to wait until the beginning of March for the built-in Blur ray drive and voila!

beojeff wrote:

Blu-Ray just took a serious hit today with the announcement by Apple that HD movies are now available for download purchase -- not just rentals anymore.

I think it's exactly the opposite cause the download nearly costs the same as a blu-ray disc.

I have a blu-ray player and think downloading is no alternative. Blu-ray has a much better quality than any download. Also my internet connection couldn't handle that. If you look at datarates up to 30 MB/s I think we are far away from streaming and downloading. At the Moment Blu-ray has the same codec as the download files but a datarate twice as high.

Also AppleTV has a very poor quality if you ever watched a real blu-ray disc.

Tim,

I'm certainly not against blu-ray and think that much criticism against blu-ray has been quite harsh. I actually have a very large library of blu-ray discs. However, I absolutely think that Apple's announcement of high-def movies for download purchase will hasten blu-ray's demise. The cost for downloads is from $15 to $20 while the cost to purchase a blu-ray is often from $25 to $40. Once the download has started, the movie is ready to watch within a few seconds. Since my projector is 1080i and not 1080p, I cannot tell any difference between the video quality of the download and that of a blu-ray. The iTunes store had "Twilight" available for download the instant it was released at midnight. This is much more accessible and convenient than getting in the car and driving to a store.

Tim, you're right on point. 

I've been puzzled at the notion that somehow a hard copy of a disc is preferable to a download. The idea seems to be that when you have a disc in a case, you really own something as opposed to a digital copy which is somehow fleeting. I've been nothing but fed up with discs since before I had to deal with blu-ray. Rentals are always scratched, they don't have what I want to watch, titles always seem to cost more than I rally want to pay, and one and on...

Along comes Apple TV and now I can browse tv shows, movies, and music on screen. Everything that is available is there. No driving from store to store or waiting for a disc to come in the mail. Cost ranges from comparable to significantly less than a hard copy, and I can back up my copy with the greatest of ease making it easily more robust than a single fallible plastic disc.

So all that's left is quality. Frankly it's a temporary distinction, as digital media matures its quality has come along in line with products' ability to make use of a higher level of sophistication. And even so, it's just not enough. Not enough people really care about the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray let alone Blu-Ray and HD Downloads. Whatever tiny feeble legs Blu-Ray had sprouted have been taken out from under it. 

Have been watching AppleTV for over a year now. The HD-ready films look brilliant on my flatscreen - you'd hear a difference between that and a Blu-ray version (if they bothered to do a good transfer, not always the case), but you wouldn't see a difference. I have tried, and there isn't one. But if I had a 65" plus flatscreen, I'd consider Blu-ray a benefit.

However, the sheer and complete convenience of watching downloaded movies, a minute after I have pressed buy, completely trumps messing about with buying the discs. Sorry, can't be bothered to. I can download the same movie 7-8 times for what a Blu-ray version would cost me, and for what? I have hundreds of DVDs boxed up in the loft, and definitely don't intend to have rows of BD covers in my listening room - where there aren't many CDs either, just my most recent purchases.

Blu-ray on disc is over. Blu-ray as download, however, will be provided over the net. As to prices on AppleTV, first release prices are always higher, until the films are made available as rentals a few weeks in.

sorry but I have both an AppleTV and a Blu-ray player and the picture of the blu-ray is much better.

First of alle the AppleTv doesn't support real 1080p. 1080p material is downscaled to 720p and then upscaled to 1080p for output because of the graficscard that is installed 🙁 

The next thing is that it only supports very low datarates. The datarate on the AppleTV is less than a third of the blu-ray while they both use the same codec. Especially in dark scenes the blu-ray offers a lot more details. Often you don't know that there is something till you saw a blu-ray 😉

The next thing is the audio. The new formats are very good but the 5.1 or above PCM sound (uncompressed) on some blu-rays is just stunning.

You also only have one language when you download a video on blu-rays you always have several languages in different audio formats.

I only buy discs with french, english and german audio. 

You also shouldn't forget that the itunes store only offers videos in the US. Also a lot of people don't have an internet connection that supports downloading so much data. 

I think we will download high definition material in the future but at the moment there is no equivalent to blu-ray because of the high quality and the data. Just remember most blu-rays have more than 25GB on them. When using the PCM audio they have app. 50GB! 😕

At the moment I have 174 Blu-rays and every single one is worth the price I payed. I think the most expensive one was Batman the Dark Knight for what I payed 30€.

Well, as you can see above, I do make a distinction for the audio. WHEN the movie companies do a good transfer, and there are lots of inferior BD transfers, then you get excellent sound - but that means they have to go back to the original mix, which they often don't bother with. So it's worth listening out for that. New releases don't have this problem as much.

With a large enough screen, you'll see that BD has greater detail, also in dark areas, and sometimes in highlights. But when full-HD is shown on screens up to 50" size, then you don't distinguish between HD-ready and Full-HD. There are numerous, numerous studies that show this to be the case.

The proviso is that you're at a normal viewing distance when doing the comparison, and not standing 30cm away from your screen.

Tim wrote:

sorry but I have both an AppleTV and a Blu-ray player and the picture of the blu-ray is much better.

First of alle the AppleTv doesn't support real 1080p. 1080p material is downscaled to 720p and then upscaled to 1080p for output because of the graficscard that is installed 🙁 

The next thing is that it only supports very low datarates. The datarate on the AppleTV is less than a third of the blu-ray while they both use the same codec. Especially in dark scenes the blu-ray offers a lot more details. Often you don't know that there is something till you saw a blu-ray 😉

The next thing is the audio. The new formats are very good but the 5.1 or above PCM sound (uncompressed) on some blu-rays is just stunning.

You also only have one language when you download a video on blu-rays you always have several languages in different audio formats.

I only buy discs with french, english and german audio. 

You also shouldn't forget that the itunes store only offers videos in the US. Also a lot of people don't have an internet connection that supports downloading so much data. 

I think we will download high definition material in the future but at the moment there is no equivalent to blu-ray because of the high quality and the data. Just remember most blu-rays have more than 25GB on them. When using the PCM audio they have app. 50GB! 😕

At the moment I have 174 Blu-rays and every single one is worth the price I payed. I think the most expensive one was Batman the Dark Knight for what I payed 30€.

I completely agree with Tim. When everyone has a good enough internet connection and Apple TV provides movie downloads of full 30-50GB blu-rays i.e. exactly what you get when you buy a blu-ray disc, then downloads may take over. Having said that though, lossless audio hasn't exactly taken over. People seem content to play ridiculously compressed, low quality mp3s on their B&O equipment - it amazes me to find people on here who have Beolab 5 speakers, yet play mp3s from their ipod on their system. To me, this is blasphemy!!. So maybe most people will be content with services like Apple TV which only offer around a third the quality of a blu-ray in 720p with 5.1 sound. However, this sounds to me as something that goes against what B&O is all about - truth to the original source in terms of sound and picture. So it seems strange to me that people on this particular forum are content with feeding their high quality B&O with low quality source material. If you are into this then you may as well just stick to the mainstream brands which offer lower quality equipment to match lower quality sources.

I haven't made any difference between 720p and 1080p because I know that there is not much difference between these two with the screens you mentioned. But I have made a difference between blu-ray and the HD-movies apple has on the itunes store.

The main problem is that you don't get things back that have gone lost when reencoding at low datarate. The problem is that  a well encoded 720p file can be much better than a 1080p one with a low datarate.  The problem with the studies you mentioned is that they always where made with reference files and these files have datarates that are comparable to those of the blu-ray. I never said that 1080p is better than 720p because this depends on a variety of parameters (screen, scaler, interlaced, noninterlaced, bitrate, compression, .....). But I did say that streaming and downloading movies for example from the itunes store is not that good as it will be in 10 years because we need more discspace on computers (1TB = 20 movies in blu-ray quality), then we need the internet connections that support these large files. 

I think all this will take 10 years till it is really usable for costumers. When we look at the mp3 we will see how long it took till they where fully accepted. MP3 is accepted since really used by a large crowd since 2003-2005 and was invented in 1982 and announced in 1992 😕

By the way the next standard will be ultra high definition and this also can be stored on the blu-ray because it can store up to 400GB on a single disc 😉