News written by Petteri Pyyny (May, 2006)

Pioneer announced this week that it has started shipping world's first Blu-ray Disc -compatible PC drives. The drive will be capable of burning 25GB single layer BD discs and sells for about $1,000 in the U.S. according to various retailer sites.

The drive, called Pioneer BDR-101A is extremely costly by many standards, but compared to most offerings by its rivalling HD-DVD camp, the ability to burn discs in addition to reading them, is a huge bonus to many professionals and enthusiasts. And of course, it wasn't that long ago when recordable DVD drives used to cost more than a budget PC.

The drive will ship with blank BD disc from TDK and with Blu-ray -capable software bundle from Roxio that includes tools for authoring and burning HD content to Blu-ray discs. Blank single layer Blu-ray discs cost currently appx $25 in the United States.

Source: Pioneer press release

It took about seven years for us to realize that not all people are particularly interested in DVD ripping, backing up movies, editing video files, converting videos to other formats, etc. Apparently, some people just prefer to watch the videos. Weird..

Anyway, as we try to be the one-stop shop for all people who are interested in digital video (and digital multimedia in general), we added a new guide to our site, helping out the people who really couldn't care less whether HC is a better MPEG-2 encoder than CCE or vice versa. Actually, the guide tries to make it easy reading for users who don't even quite grasp the concept of different video encoding methods.

So, here's the very basic guide for people who just want to watch their videos:

How to play AVI?

As we tried to keep the guide as simple as possible, it doesn't go into details, but instead provides a set of links for "further reading" in case the guide sparks the need to know the digital video world slightly better. In order to assist with this task, the guide is accompanied by two "helper guides":