Blu-ray - coming to a PC near you soon?

Now that HD-DVD is all but forgotten Blu-ray is quickly beginning to appear in PC's and laptops with internal BD (Blu-ray Disk) drives starting at £55 and writers around £130.  Blank media remains pricey however with 25GB blanks costing around £25 for 10 - still that's 250GB of backup - around 53 DVD's or 357 CD's.

Another reason to buy a BD drive would be to watch HD movies on your PC but beware.  Home movies aren't a problem but for commercial releases your setup has to support HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection), a system aimed at preventing copying of HD content that applies to your BD drive, graphics card, software player and even monitor.

Luckily CyberLink has created the free CyberLink Blu-ray Disc Advisor utility which scans your PC and reports which items are compatible and which need replacing - don't even think of buying a BD drive without checking - even owners of fairly new systems are likely to be disappointed.

Those poor folk who bought HD-DVD movies will be cheered to know that LG do a drive combining a BD reader, HD-DVD reader and DVD read/writer for £80 which may help them make the switch to Blu-ray without losing the use of their existing movies.

Finally an obvious point that seems to be lost on many - remember for the true HD experience you need 1080 horizontal lines and that means a 24" screen or larger!