Pay To Play DVD/Blu-Ray? Windows 8 Sucks
Tech news reports I saw this weekend drop this bombshell on Hollywood as well as PC consumers: the next-generation Windows 8 operating system won’t automatically play DVDs and Blu-ray – even if your laptop has a DVD or Blu-ray drive. Instead Windows 8 will require you to fork over cash. Expect from greedy Microsoft an extra-cost option to install a Windows Media Center software upgrade to allow DVD and Blu-ray playback. Let’s hope a 3rd party freebie bitchslaps this abomination.
Disgusting.
Well. Not as bad as iTunes. Which won’t play competing file types no matter how much you pay.
I call bull***. It plays songs bought from Amazon just fine.
Not like Windows 7, Linux, or OSX play Bluray anyway. In fact, your only options for Bluray support are to play $100 to Arcsoft or Cyberlink for their shitty software that only supports playback for 6 months.
From the way I read it, it has nothing to do with the drives, they just took the playback function out of WMP so you have to upgrade to Media Center. There are free players you can install though. You don’t have to give Microsoft any more money for their bloatware.
I guess millions will skip upgrading to windows 8. This will not go over well at all. When will the crazy stop!
Let’s just calm down here. While it’s true that Windows 8 is going to require the purchase of an add-on pack to install Windows Media Player and – along with it – DVD playback, there’s a litany of other programs you can install for free that will provide you with the same functionality. Windows XP didn’t come with native DVD playback either, but after a thirty second visit to http://www.videolan.org, crisis was – and will continue to be – averted.
Ugh. Thankfully, I watch via the actual bluray or DVD player.
Yes, this is preferable, as your TV is probably bigger than your computer screen, but if you’re on the road, that’s not possible. Many people have laptop DVD/Blu-Ray players, and will not be happy having to pay extra for the privilege of using the drive for its intended purpose.
Thank God for VLC media player. It’s free and plays everything!
Exactly, including blurays.
Will VLC (I Love it!) work with Window 8 though?
This is one of the times I’m glad I have a Mac and I haven’t upgraded my OSX for a while. This is just so stupid! Frankly I have a DVD player and a BluRay, but honestly this is greedy and ridiculous of Microsoft. Jerks!
I have a friend who just went through a week of frusteration trying to get her itunes library on her iphone. Turns out that yup, she had to pay itunes an extra $30 to store her songs on Cloud and thus be given the priviledge of accessing them from more than one device. When it comes to greedy and ridiculous, Apple practices the anything you can do, I can do better approach.
I think the difference here is that iCloud is a new service and there are costs associated with storage…it’s not something that has always been included and is now being taken away. Playback in Windows is a current feature that is being disabled unless you pay extra.
It is not a new service. They don’t provide music storage for everyone. They keep ONE copy of each song on a server (which they already do to sell them on iTunes). You can then access the songs you paid for from any device. You’re just redownloading it.
Apple’s also an awful company, but I feel bad for your friend because she didn’t need to spend any money. All she had to do was copy the iTunes library folder and she would have been in good shape.
This is untrue. iCloud is free up to a certain amount of storage. And you don’t have to do iCloud to share music and movies on up to FIVE devices. Apple’s profit margin is ridiculous, but you get quality and fairness up to a point, more so than any product I’ve ever owned, bar none.
I too love my Mac, but you can’t play Blu-Rays at all on Apple products…
This is not true. While APPLE doesn’t provide any blu-ray drives, they are available as an add-on from third party retailers like macsales.com.
The argument isn’t over a few bucks, it’s over a remarkable mindset. Folks like Blair Westlake bust their balls creating bridges into town and Ballmer and his short-sited henchmen blow them up.
What’s disturbing is the trend; Windows7 introduced a new update to Windows Media Center – an extensible product that could be used for anything – including many vendors shipping Cable Card controllers, etc.
Now, with Windows8, those inbuilt tools are ripped out of all versions, and the only version eligible to get them is Windows8 PRO. Yes, that means no matter what, if you want the tools to playback MPG/DVD native CODECs, “Home Premium” and other versions will not be eligible, and will never, without a 3rd party application, provide this support.
This is effectively taking away from customers something that has been a significant price value for them, and it undercuts their vendors and third party partners (like Ceton, SiliconDust, and others) who find themselves suddenly on the outside as the installed base that is eligible for their product drops significantly.
In the end, it’s a cash grab – but a damn poor one. What’s sad is that Apple gives away the DVD decoding tools in MacOS – available everywhere for $50 as an upgrade; but Microsoft with a significantly higher installed base, and therefore a lower negotiated cost per license, is refusing to offer something it did in the past, and requiring customers to foot the bill twice – by buying a version many would not have considered in the past (pro is a $30 cost over home premium) and by then tacking on additional costs through this add on method.
This is in the end, a TERRIBLE marketing decision on their end; man consumers had expected Microsoft to provide BluRay or options to integrate BluRay; this completely goes the opposite direction and costs customers as a result.
This is a non-issue as others have noted. There are plenty of free players and if anything, this will be a motivator for a 3rd party to offer an even better application to fill the gap. If you are keeping score on greedy tech companies, Apple has to be at the top of anyone’s list. Microsoft, on the other hand, has just released their cloud system, Skydrive, that has more features and more storage for less money than anyone. Last on that list? Apple.