I wanted to take this opportunity and share with you a message from Macrosystem CEO Sprave -- this is in response to customer inquiries/questions about the capability of the S4000/PRO with the Blu-ray drive:
Hello,
I would like to inform you about the Blu-Ray situation.
First, we currently are able to generate a Blu-Ray disk (or a CD, or a DVD or a USB storage device) that contains video/audio files in beautiful High Def quality. These files are fully compatible with the Sony Playstation3 and halfway modern PCs (if you use a freeware software player like the VLC media player).
This represents certainly more than 90% of all High Def capable playback devices in the possession of consumers. Blu-Ray stand alone players are just not very common still. PCs are, and PS3s as well.
So if you deliver an HD version of your production (a file on a disk or stick) to your customer, almost everyone will be able to play it, either on his PC/laptop or on his Playstation3.
Yes, we need to support full menu structures and also generate disks that play on the newer Blu-Ray standalone players, and we will. But the ability to deliver a playable HD file had first priority.
Also, let us not forget that the earlier Blu-Ray players often could not play back burned media at all. This may have been the case because of the "copyright paranoia" that still is present in the Blu-Ray market. In any case when we bought the first round of players, many refused BD-R disks in general - no matter what was stored on them. Magazine reviews confirmed that result.
And there was no standard in sight. We saw many competing formats (BD-AV, AVCHD etc). with no clear winner at that time.
A few months ago, we re-visited the situation, and we concluded that by then, many (but still not all) Blu-Ray players in fact do play AVCHD formatted DVD-Rs and BD-Rs.
We immediately started to work on that format, and we will soon (this year) release a (free) update for Arabesk that burns an AVCHD disk with a very basic menu.
But for being able (and allowed) to generate a more complex menu, we had to enroll MacroSystem as a licensee of the AVCHD format. For this, we had to contact Sony Japan, which happens to be in charge of the AVCHD licensing program. We duly did all the required formal steps, including a hefty payment in Japanese Yen for the license. This all took a few months.
Now, we are actually in possession of a fully signed contract, and we are waiting for the official documentation of the format. The arrival is expected any day now.
It is not surprising that Sony themselves already have software out there that supports AVCHD, as they are much closer to the sources of information. MacroSystem as a smaller player simply has a disadvantage here. We will try to compensate by delivering a powerful and easy to use software in the future.
So, soon we will hopefully release Arabesk 5 with full AVCHD support for DVD-R and BD-R, with complete menu authoring. The BogartSE equipped machines will then carry the official AVCHD logo. Both is indeed high priority for us.
In the meantime (and even after the Arabesk 5 release), it makes sense to ask the customer if he has a PS3 or a reasonably fast PC or laptop, and then give him a file in pristine quality.
On behalf of MacroSystem, I apologize for any inconvenience or frustration that this delay may have caused, and I assure you that we are working very hard on a solution.
Regards
Jörg Sprave
PS: You can read about AVCHD on Wikipedia, and here:
http://www.avchd-info.org/
We are not (yet) listed as a licensee, as the list dates from April 10.