Ma.tt (his actual domain name), the father of the WordPress blogging system, snapped this photo at the SxSW event and it gave me a cold chill for some reason:
I did a little searching and realized that I had already been exposed to the idea that Blu-Ray was colluding with Java. Now it occurs to me to wonder: Has there been demand for free multimedia players to support the Java functionality necessary to play Blu-Ray discs?
It depends whether it gets used for anything useful/interesting on discs I suppose. How are the Blu Ray menus written? Are they Java?
Yes, Blu-Ray menus are Java as well. It’s all part of BD-J. But the hard part for free multimedia players is not BD-J, it’s the DRM (AACS and especially BD+). Until those are effectively broken, free players can’t even play the main movie. Only when that becomes possible, will users demand BD-J.
Who gives a damn? I think some people might enjoy games built on DVD-menus, for example, but most people are more interested in movie itself. So bonus features may be safely ignored. But maybe somebody will be lucky to see java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
Personally I’m afraid of the fact they employ interlaced VC-1.
i think bd-j (what a horrible acronym) will actually create a new market…
imagine all of those wildly popular internet flash games, now imagine anyone (with a blue ray player) can play it on the tv. i’m not sure how fast the bd-j engine is, but i’m sure some games can / will be ported.
can you imagine a bd-j disk with 20-50gb of games ? perhapse filled with gpl games? tuxracer? pysol? crack attack?
but of course, it will be trouble for the open source multimedia players to support these things. one could say its been difficult for the oss players to even support DVD MENUS. hehe.
icedtea is GPL, IFF there is a reason to implement it we got already most of the tools. (now I’d rather not have that, still better java than an obscure NiH-syndrome virtual machine and language)