Sony BDP-SX1 portable Blu-ray player

Just as DVD players inevitably shrank to become portable, so have the Blu-ray successors. Whether this actually makes difference to you depends on how many Blu-ray discs you have and how much you might want to watch them away from home. Sony BDP-SX1 portable Blu-ray player Worth the disc? Sony's BDP-SX1 The BDP-SX1 is not …

[Anonymous Coward]

Why!

Why I cry, when in the UK we can apparently rip disc's for legal use would you not use a netbook with the ripped movie on, indeed even higher resolution than the 1024 x 600 pixels this unit affords.

Indeed the lack of a car-adapter charger in the package does lament it's target audience of kids in the back seat being made silent.

A device with blueray disc- no screeen and TV connections and ability to....rip discs's onto a memory stick that you could plug into your tablet or laptop (yes there is life beyond apple when i said memory sticks and tablets) would be a far more palatable solution.

Heck the new PSP will have a higher resolution thats more in-step with what this is offering and cheaper as well.

That all sa\id I'm sure this has a market, just a market for people who don't fully understand technology and like buzzwords like blueray whilst not being able to tell the difference from a DVD.

A rather pedestrian offfering from a company that can do better.

[dotdavid]

Memory stick

"yes there is life beyond apple when i said memory sticks"

Surely you're not advocating people use the defunct Sony format?

Joking aside, I think ripping a disk (especially a Blu-Ray, it being so much larger than a DVD) is a bit of a pain (encoding time and storage costs) and a lot of people can't be bothered with it, even if they are people that "understand technology". A little gadget to do this would be useful though - the transcoding could be done in hardware and hopefully be faster and more idiot-proof than it is on a PC.

That said there's a difference between the law turning a blind eye to you ripping disks for personal use and the law turning a blind eye to a company making a gadget to allow you to do so en-masse. I suspect the law is somewhat less forgiving in the latter case.

[Anonymous Coward]

Noisy kids?

Duct tape.

[Nick Ryan]

Dead before birth

Who the hell cares about portable disc players?

Blu-ray uptake is pretty appalling really - partly due to content saturation (have a DVD, why buy the same content again?), the greed when it comes to pricing but also the supposed "benefits"... an extra hour or two of extras that (almost) nobody watches and improved quality that while distinctly better than DVD, the majority of jo-public don't care to even notice. Hell, half of the Blu-Ray players I've seen are connected to the TV using Scart cables or worse.

And this is before you take into account Internet downloads...

[Matt_payne666]

I like this... and it makes a much better tool than my laptop - 5 hours life has surprised me, my lappy certainly cant pull that sort of endurance while spinning a disk!

[Annihilator]

"lappy"

Didn't that word get banished from El Reg on pain of death along with mobey?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm...

...ogg not on the list.

It ain't comming in (to my home)

[Eddie Johnson]

No Surprise There!

The real surprise is that Sony supported mkv, wmv and wma. I wouldn't believe it until I tested it though.

[MJI]

Cue the comments

I know what you are going to get.

Comment 1 - DVD players are a lot cheaper.

Answer - lots of people have Blu Rays and not the DVDs.

Comment 2 - The PS3 is cheaper and a better BR player.

Answer - it isn't portable.

[Jedit]

What a pointless device

Let's see, what does BD have over DVD as a format. Full HD picture quality? This player isn't even HD-ready. High quality sound at up to 7.1? Nope, you'll be stuck with 2.0. Well, I guess for a few fanatics there's also BD-Live content on the intern... whoops, sorry, you can't have that either.

Still, you'll be able to watch your Blu-rays away from home. This would be a big selling point to someone who had nothing but BDs in his movie collection, if so many big movies weren't released on BD with a DVD or digital copy.

[Matt_payne666]

some of us do have only BD in thier collection... This isnt supposed to be the centre of your home cinema, but a way of watching content when out and about...

Ripping BD? well, i suppose its possible, but to be honest, I couldnt be bothered. My laptop (P9600 c2duo Dell XFR), while more than capable of playing HD rips would munch the battery - before a film is finished.

[dotdavid]

Actually

"My laptop (P9600 c2duo Dell XFR), while more than capable of playing HD rips would munch the battery - before a film is finished."

Actually I think playing a HD-encoded MPEG-4 or whatever from a hard drive will use less power than playing a HD Blu-Ray disc. I've found in the past that battery life gains can be made quite easily by ripping discs to ISO and emulating an optical drive.

But yeah, ripping is a pain.

[JEDIDIAH]

Spinning disks....

...it probably takes a good amount of extra energy to keep a spinning disk spinning.

Extracting that element out of the situation probably significantly improves the life of the laptop.

Although any clamshell device is ultimately going to be less convenient than a "tablet" in a lot of situations.

[JEDIDIAH]

Yeah. Ripping is a bother.

On the one hand you've got an encrypted media format and a certain contingent that will gleefully declare that it is only legal to play that encrypted format on blessed players. On the other hand, you have an inferior encryption format that locks you into a single hardware vendor. Plus the legal landscape makes the tools for liberating either one more bothersome to deal with.

The annoyances and pitfalls of DRM still make physical media relevant. It may be for nothing more than as a token of ownership or it may be as a primary playback medium because you just want portability and aren't terribly geeky.

DRM and anti-cracking laws continue to make physical media more relevant than it should be.

[deadmonkey]

Your comments are a little misleading if someone was looking for a player which could hook up to other output devices.

"Likewise, if you hook it up to an AV receiver, Dolby and DTS-HD soundtracks sound superb."

Some folks on here should lift up their eyes from their monitors and see that others sometimes have different requirements to themselves :P

[MJI]

Blu Ray purchasing

Yes I am buying them, and rebuying a few of my favourite films.

This does appeal but is slightly too expensive

[fattymcbutterpants]

?????????

A Blu-ray player that doesn't support Blu-ray resolution.

Nope.

[MJI]

The Screen not the Player

They have to output what is read, the screen isn't HD that is all

[Some Beggar]

"the screen isn't HD that is all"

Oh that's OK then.

[boggle]

[Christian Berger]

Makes sense from Sony's standpoint

After all this device allows you to use Blu-ray disks without breaking the DRM. And from the standpoint of Sony everybody likes DRM. That's why people buy Sony. (oh wait, how did the market share go after the switch to DVD?)

So you buy a movie, and obviously it's in Blu-ray because of it's much better (=stricter) DRM. An added bonus is the better quality in your living room.

Obviously any sane person will just rip a Blu-ray the moment it comes in the mail. After all nobody knows if you will still be able to play those disks in a few years. 30 gigs isn't a lot of space these days anyhow.

[Chris 171]

Kids!

Not that you need Peppa Pig on BD, hence why I have a vanilla DVD version from Sony but sure does give you that 15/20 mins of concentration time when doing something urgently with the child in tow.

Pimp my pushchair I've dubbed it, fits in the car too & worked a treat on a recent flight in all.

There is a market for these things, despite being able to replicate its functionality on a laptop / pokeslab.

/converted