Pioneer will soon release the first 4K Blu-ray drive for PC

Pioneer will soon release the first 4K Blu-ray drive for PC

Pioneer will soon release the first 4K Blu-ray drive for PC

 
Sometimes it takes a while for some technology to move into the consumer market, especially when market demand is low. For many years people have called physical media “dead”, especially as subscription services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Spotify have negated the need for a collection of physical media and have created a seemingly limitless online library oof content to explore. 
 

Most consumers have not even heard of the new 4K Blu-ray standard, offering high-quality 4K content to the masses and levels of sound quality that just cannot be matched by streaming services. That being said DVDs still lead the pack when it comes to physical media and Blu-ray has still not become the “industry standard” for physical media.   

While digital goods have grown in popularity, there is still demand for high-quality physical media, even on PC, which makes it odd that 4K Blu-ray has not already made it onto the PC platform, with standalone 4K Blu-ray players already being available and even coming as an included extra on the Xbox One. 

Pioneer has now announced that they will be releasing their first 4K Blu-ray drives for PC in February, with their BDR-S11J-BK and BDR-S11J-X. Both will offer similar features, with the BDR-SIIJ-X serving as a higher-end quieter version which is said to offer improved audio quality when playing CDs. 

Both models will come with a copy of Cyberlink PoowerDVD, which is one of the few programs that can actually decode Blu-rays on PC for content playback, though playing 4K Blu-rays comes with a catch.

The listed system requirements for 4K Blu-ray include the need for an HDMI 2.0a connection 6GB of system memory and a Kaby Lake CPU, which certainly limits the number of systems that can play 4K Blu-ray content. This is due to 4K BVlu-ray requiring H.265 decoding capabilities, though oddly this is a feature of both AMD’s Polaris GPUs and Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs, making it odd that 4K content playback is limited to Kaby Lake. 

Pioneer will soon release the first 4K Blu-ray drive for PC

 

Those who want to use a 4K Blu-ray player on PC will need to bear these requirements in mind, though it is likely that Polaris and Pascal will be supported with future patches to Blu-ray playback software, though this issue will likely annoy a lot of potential users in the short term. 

These two 5.25-inch 4K Blu-ray players will release sometime in February to the Japanese market, with worldwide availability at a later date. No pricing has been announced for these products.     

 

You can join the discussion on Pioneer’s 4K Blu-ray drives for PC on the OC3D Forums. 

 

Pioneer will soon release the first 4K Blu-ray drive for PC

Pioneer will soon release the first 4K Blu-ray drive for PC

 
Sometimes it takes a while for some technology to move into the consumer market, especially when market demand is low. For many years people have called physical media “dead”, especially as subscription services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Spotify have negated the need for a collection of physical media and have created a seemingly limitless online library oof content to explore. 
 

Most consumers have not even heard of the new 4K Blu-ray standard, offering high-quality 4K content to the masses and levels of sound quality that just cannot be matched by streaming services. That being said DVDs still lead the pack when it comes to physical media and Blu-ray has still not become the “industry standard” for physical media.   

While digital goods have grown in popularity, there is still demand for high-quality physical media, even on PC, which makes it odd that 4K Blu-ray has not already made it onto the PC platform, with standalone 4K Blu-ray players already being available and even coming as an included extra on the Xbox One. 

Pioneer has now announced that they will be releasing their first 4K Blu-ray drives for PC in February, with their BDR-S11J-BK and BDR-S11J-X. Both will offer similar features, with the BDR-SIIJ-X serving as a higher-end quieter version which is said to offer improved audio quality when playing CDs. 

Both models will come with a copy of Cyberlink PoowerDVD, which is one of the few programs that can actually decode Blu-rays on PC for content playback, though playing 4K Blu-rays comes with a catch.

The listed system requirements for 4K Blu-ray include the need for an HDMI 2.0a connection 6GB of system memory and a Kaby Lake CPU, which certainly limits the number of systems that can play 4K Blu-ray content. This is due to 4K BVlu-ray requiring H.265 decoding capabilities, though oddly this is a feature of both AMD’s Polaris GPUs and Nvidia’s Pascal GPUs, making it odd that 4K content playback is limited to Kaby Lake. 

Pioneer will soon release the first 4K Blu-ray drive for PC

 

Those who want to use a 4K Blu-ray player on PC will need to bear these requirements in mind, though it is likely that Polaris and Pascal will be supported with future patches to Blu-ray playback software, though this issue will likely annoy a lot of potential users in the short term. 

These two 5.25-inch 4K Blu-ray players will release sometime in February to the Japanese market, with worldwide availability at a later date. No pricing has been announced for these products.     

 

You can join the discussion on Pioneer’s 4K Blu-ray drives for PC on the OC3D Forums. 

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