New Study Finds Low Interest In Blu-ray 895
PHPNerd writes "A new consumer survey recently released chronicles the woes of the winner of the hi-definition format war: nobody wants it. While consumers were very happy to embrace the DVD standard when it came about because it brought a huge jump in quality over VHS, the pros of switching to Blu-ray are not as obvious. From the article: 'In contrast, while half of the respondents to our survey rated Blu-ray's quality as 'much better' than standard DVD, another 40% termed it only 'somewhat better,' and most are very satisfied with the performance of their current DVD players." Another reason cited was that a Blu-ray investment also dictates an HDTV purchase, something consumers are reluctant to do.'" Maybe it's also that line-doubling DVD players can be had for less than a hundred dollars.
Personally... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a HD fan - in fact, I rarely watch SD any more when it comes to OTA programming. I just don't seem to care much any more about HD over DVD quality programs. As the summary says, line doublers while they aren't great (nowhere close to 1080p quality) work 'okay'. I held off because of the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD battle, and that showed me that there really wasn't a need for either.
That, and the fact that many Blu-Ray discs take 90+ seconds to go from insertion to movie watching is just stupid. If I buy a copy of a movie I want to watch it, not play with it. A 'quick-play' mode (and note that I'm not even talking about watching mandatory trailer-crap, just getting the damn thing 'loaded') would dramatically increase the odds that I'd buy into it.
I'll probably pick one up when my current DVD player finally dies... but there's no compelling reason to do so before it does. And this from a self-confessed geek who at least used to have a ton of home theatre stuff.
When Is Perfection Too Much? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't buy the conclusions of this article. There is a clear difference in quality with true HD versus DVD. But it's true that at some point, you can't tell the difference anymore, so nobody cares. Sort of like why does anyone want a 4 GHz Pentium processor for Microsoft Office, is that really useful?
The same will happen for HD for maybe 10 years: there will be only minor tweaks, prices will fall, but no new jump in quality. What I see (hope) as the next jump is "experience immersion". When I take a picture or short movie with my digital camera, I want the audience to fell exactly what I felt. When I hike a mountain at 5,000 meters, it's freezing, breathing is hard... I snapped a picture, but you can't see what experience it was. I'm willing to wait another 10 years, but this has to happen at some point. It's all about sharing our experiences, after all.
Alain - fairsoftware.net
Bahh, the beginning of DVD was little different (Score:5, Interesting)
DVD Will Fail [robertsdvd.com]
Sony Hater (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll admit it, I'm a Sony hater. Been bit too many times by their crappy proprietary media, computers, interfaces and software. It's plain old DVD for me for the foreseeable future. In my mind BlueRay==Sony.
Well I have a HDTV and a PS3, and Blu-Ray Rocks (Score:4, Interesting)
I have made the purchases of course, knowing that I would want to get an HDTV eventually, my wife and I went and bought a good one that should last us a while. We also got a PS3 after careful consideration, and I have to say the Blu-Ray movies are *much* better than regular DVD in my opinion. I don't regret either purchase to be honest, but they are expensive pieces of hardware at the moment I admit.
Of course once you are used to it, the difference is mostly noticeable when you go *back* to viewing regular DVDs or TV broadcasts. The difference between the Digital TV and HDTV while still noticeable is much less and much less noticeable.
I think its mostly that the cost is too high for most people to want to pay for. Geeks are probably more inclined to shell out for good equipment in the first place and I would expect them to be early adopters as a result.
Video always loses to audio (Score:5, Interesting)
I still can't figure out why people are so fascinated with video: higher resolution, faster refresh rates, more colors, etc. Yes, visuals are very important. But, in my opinion, video is the least important feature in the chain when it comes to movies. Sports is another thing, usually, but I'd even wager that I could win a debate regarding video versus audio in even live sporting events.
Watch a great thriller: Hitchcock if you will. Turn off the audio and watch the movie. Turn off the video and watch the movie. Compare.
Now, watch it again with BETTER audio (subwoofers, clear highs, decent surround sound). Compare.
Radio still can thrill me with good audio productions. I still prefer most sporting events on the radio over the TV, personally, as one's imagination really builds a lot of emotional connection to the game.
Yes, high res is amazing, and it can be "lifelike" but without a good audio backend, it's trash. Instead of spending tons of cash on the best video chain, spend a bit firming up your audio system, including minimizing reflections in your theatre room, reducing vibrations of the floor or furniture, etc. It's a worthwhile investment, and you'll get great music quality, to boot.
BluRay? Not today... (Score:5, Interesting)
RS
Re:Personally... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is the quality better? OF COURSE! But then again...I have an upconvert player and it looks good too.
Maybe it's good enough. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Maybe it's also that line-doubling DVD players can be had for less than a hundred dollars."
True. Line-doubled DVD content played out via HDMI to a big LCD display isn't bad. There's a noticeable improvement when you go to an all-digital path to the display. As you'd expect, vertical edges get sharper. The transition from an analog video path to a digital one may provide more improvement than the next step of a data rate upgrade of Blu-Ray.
Audio formats better than CDs never caught on. DVD-Audio, at 96 kHz with 24-bit samples, solves the problems of CD-quality audio. With CD audio, soft passages may be only 4 or 5 bit audio, with the high bits all zero. That's quite noticeable. But only classical music has soft passages any more. Few people buy DVD-Audio discs. (Of course, they have DRM, which is another issue.)
Once Blu-Ray players drop to the point that they're no more expensive than DVD players, they will, of course, take over. But there's no big rush.
Re:I personally don't have much interest in it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Also a techie and also a flim fan. I find the difference quite noticeable and though new Blue-Ray movies are too expensive, I'm willing to buy my favourite ones second hand from Amazon. However, though I want Blue-Ray, I also want it to work. After battling with the crap that is PowerDVD on Windows or the frustration that is decrypting the discs on Linux, neither option appeals anymore and I'm just giving up on it. I'll take another look at the technology in another six months, perhaps. And if the situation for watching the bloody things on my computer (my main media centre) has improved, then I might start buying some again. (I currently have two). Its been a near complete waste of my time so far.
Well Duh (Score:3, Interesting)
I went out and bought an HD-DVD player when they where on sale. I got one $99.00 before Blue-Ray won.
It is a nice DVD player and the movies that I watch on it are also good. But when I bought it the check out person was shocked that I paid so much for a DVD player! I tried to explain HD to them and got a blank stare. People think that DVDs are HD!
Frankly DVDs look great on my HDTV. Not even the HD-DVDs but the regular ones.
Yep I have a feeling that if it wasn't for the PS3 that we would be looking at Beta V2.0
I have to wonder just how many none PS3 players are out there? It is hard to tell because from what I hear the PS3 is the best player.
DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
The day they remove the DRM is the day I buy Blu-ray. It's just not worth my money paying for something that's designed to make it as difficult as possible to view what I buy in the quality I paid for.
For the general population, I believe the reason many embraced DVD was the navigation. Instant chapter jumps, no rewinding. Yes, it had superior quality over VHS, but for anybody but the specially interested I don't think that was the killer feature.
Blu-ray? Its *only* offer over DVD is resolution/quality on HD TV sets. And to get that you have to accept DRM that effectively means you're allowed to watch your movies for as long as "they" decide you can.
Unfortunately, the masses didn't seem to learn much from the music DRM fiasko. But luckily Blu-ray lacks any kind of killer feature so it's not being accepted as quickly as it otherwise might have been.
I'll stick to my HD media jukebox and MKVs for now, thank you very much. I would have bought a Blu-ray player for that money if it weren't for the DRM.
Re:It's being pushed anyway (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course they're going to push it on us. They want us to buy Blue-Ray players, and hopefully replace our DVD movie library with brand new Blu-Ray discs. That would bring in a lot of revenue.
But we consumers are not the mindless drones that marketing execs would like us to be. Usually when we buy something, it provides us with a benefit. In this case, the benefit isn't big enough to qualify.
DVDs have quick seek and are computer readable (with the right software). These two factors make them better than VHS. Blu-ray does not have anything comparable, and picture quality with DVD is more than adequate for more people.
Re:It's being pushed anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Price? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm in a similar position - I also should be their target audience, but in my case, though the cost is stupid for me also, the biggest factor is actually the DRM. I can actually get the movies I care about fairly cheaply second hand. But I've only bought two because the sheer agony I have endured in trying to get them to play on my computer system, is simply too much. And it makes me sincerely angry with the technology that people who simply download the films don't have the problems that I've had to go through trying to play my legally bought copies.
Re:Sony Hater (Score:5, Interesting)
My reason is simpler.
I can get DVDs for $4 to $6, sure, the new releases are still $20 to $25 on dvd, the blu-rays are all $35 and up. Sorry, but that's the equivalent of taking a family out to the movies. I can get 10 dvds for the price of one Bluray disk. Not worth it at all.
Re:It's being pushed anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone with no interest in Blue-ray, I can say it would not have mattered one bit to me if HDDVD won out.
Re:Personally... (Score:5, Interesting)
90 seconds? that's a short one.
I had just came from a service call with a client. his Sony 300B Bluray player took 6 minutes from on to being able to use the menu on the Disc for "vantage point" that is fricking insane.
I have another client that stopped buying Blu Ray discs because his player does not give enough of a quality difference to overshadow his Denon DVD player that has a decent quality scaler attached to it. (decent quality means $1100.00 or more)
I am right there in the trenches with users that have >108" screens and 1080p projectors sitting on leather seating that costs more t han Most slashdotters complete AV setup. ($12,000 for a theater chair is high end btw) these people pay over $10,000 for their speakers and THEY dont see any worth in blu ray.
Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Forget using the Blu-Ray's massive capacity to give us better resolution. Use it to give us more content. Give us a movie and every documentary and interview that the people involved have given about the movie on a single disk. Give us an entire season of a TV series on one disk, eventually the whole series on one disk.
The benefits in picture quality do not justify upgrading from DVD, but if they put more stuff on the disk, that just might be worth it.
Re:DVD is poor by comparison, but is "good enough" (Score:5, Interesting)
I've got a very nice 46" 1080p HDTV, and I do sit fairly close to it (under 10 feet away). Even so, I'm honestly not at all disappointed by the quality of DVD. I can see a difference between the 2 when I'm looking for it, but as soon as I forget about the fact that I am or am not watching an HD source and just go ahead and watch the content, I very quickly forget I'm watching DVD.
Re:Sony Hater (Score:3, Interesting)
I rip the whole disc to the HDD via AnyDVD HD in a Windows XP VirtualBox [virtualbox.org] envrionment.
I then just delete all files (.m2ts or what-have-you) except the largest file (generally 20GB or so) and play in an SVN build of Mplayer.
All is well on my end. AnyDVD HD can take every disc I've thrown at it so far.
Re:Well I have a HDTV and a PS3, and Blu-Ray is me (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bahh, the beginning of DVD was little different (Score:3, Interesting)
Amazing - that guy was comically clueless (3 years to encode the movies to MPEG-2? Was he under the impression that all of the studios combined had only one computer to do this on?).
The advantages of DVD over VHS were pretty immediately apparent - alternate languages, subtitles, random access, improved picture and (perhaps more importantly) sound quality, etc.
BlueRay (or whatever the proper name is) compared to DVD just isn't that big of a change. You get... better picture quality (with investment of $1000+ on a new television), better sound quality (with investment of $1000+ on a new home theater system), and a generally painfully slow interface even compared to the slug that is DVD (based on the few titles I have seen).
It will probably take over (assuming another brand-new format doesn't materialize in the next 5 years), but there just isn't any big push to get people to go from DVD to BlueRay. Not any more convenient (less in fact, with the increased load times and annoying menus they like to use), very expensive to get the full benefits, and more expensive for the media.
I liked the idea of BlueRay a lot more than HD-DVD (it seemed like more of a step forward), there just isn't that much demand for increased quality that the majority of people can't see or hear. DVD gave immediate, noticeable benefits even when using your other existing equipment (TV, stereo, etc.) - BlueRay really doesn't.
I don't think it will "fail" - but it isn't going to take off real soon either. Maybe as people invest in new televisions as HD broadcasting becomes more widely available (DISH has finally started offering an HD-only package, rather than requiring you to pay for 200-odd channels you never watch before allowing you to pay an additional fee for HD - the quality difference hasn't been enough for me to keep paying extra for HD and I was going to drop the HD package, but I may just switch over to the HD-only package) BlueRay will ramp up in popularity.
Re:DVD is poor by comparison, but is "good enough" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Personally... (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you have any evidence at all that the JVM is contributing materially to the delay? Or just trolling?
Java was invented for embedded devices. It's used in billions of devices around the world. The only reason you happen to know Blu-Ray also uses it is because Microsoft made a stink about it while trying to push their own proprietary standard.
Re:Price? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you look around, you can usually find sales and other decent prices. I got two titles (I only own 5 Blu-Ray titles) at Amazon for 15 bucks apiece in a sale they had for a week. As long as most DVD's look great, I don't really have a preference of DVD over Blu-Ray. I have to really like a movie a lot to buy it anyways, and if it really wows me (Like Dark Knight), I'd spend a little extra money to make it look as good as possible on my system. But for the most part, DVD's are just fine. If I see Blu-Ray sales, I'll pick them up. You can usually save a little more too if you pre-order, but that depends where you pre-order from.
Re:DVD is poor by comparison, but is "good enough" (Score:5, Interesting)
To me, the theatre experience is only 20% image quality, 20% sound. Up to 60% is the fact that I can give the movie 100% of my attention. Viewing at home, there's always some distraction (example phone, doorbell, kids, pets) preventing me from getting the full viewing experience. I'm not surprised to hear about blu-ray adoption problems. To me it's quite an investment to slighly improve the 20% part of the entire movie experience.
Re:DVD is poor by comparison, but is "good enough" (Score:0, Interesting)
I have 2 Popcornhour Network Mediatanks [popcornhour.com] feeding off a 1.98 TB RAID 5 server I have. Plays up to 1080p and all the mkv/x.264 you can throw at it. Even plays xvid, DVD ISOs etc etc.
The best $180 I ever spent on AV equipment.
Re:DVD is poor by comparison, but is "good enough" (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem isn't that Blue-ray isn't better, the problem is that without good source material, a large hi-def TV and a viewing arrangement where you can actually make out the additional detail, it is difficult or even impossible for a viewer to appreciate the extra capability.
the problem is also that you're not going to convince anyone to do any of these things when they've already got something that's "good enough".
when DVD was introduced, VHS simply wasn't good enough in comparison. The differences weren't just in picture quality; but in ease of access, durability, storage capacity, special features, etc.
You can't say that about blu-ray. even when compared to blu-ray, DVDs ARE good enough, so there's absolutely no reason for anyone to care (outside of the fringe of HD-lovers who just can't get high enough definition).
Mediocre CEO performance (Score:4, Interesting)
Most CEOs definitely take last years performance and use it to gauge this years performance. It's a decent gauge but they rarely take into account what possible changes there are in the market. However, if they missed a sale because they didn't try to do it, that's a CEO's fault. If they try to make that sale, and didn't, it's the market's fault because the people would not buy.
But in truth it's the CEO's fault for mistiming the market, and misjudging the consumer. In the 90s, consumerism took off as people bought like crazy. We were riding the wave of high investment in the dot com bubble and the y2k scare. People were taking advantage of the web to create new services, and businesses were retooling their technology to make sure they were Y2K compliant. That meant plenty of jobs and jobs meant people had money to spend.
Fast forward to Bush and jobs went from middle class white color jobs to retail walmart and burger flipping joints for minimum wage, and in the past couple of years we've been losing a lot of jobs. People don't have the money to buy large screen TVs or spend additional money when you can get a regular DVD for 5-10 in the bargain bin. If VHS was still out and movies cost $2.99, you'd see a huge amount of people buying those because that's what they could afford! DVDs are a luxury, and blu-ray is an extreme luxury. We can't afford luxuries like that.
The middle class has a money problem, so companies have a money problem. This hasn't been something that just popped up on us, it's been coming for years. Middle class wages have not kept up with inflation, and they expect us to shell out more money for something which is a mediocre upgrade. Sony picked the absolute worst time to introduce a new format, which is funny, because they haven't been able to do anything right in the innovation sector since the walkman.
Re:Price? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm in the target demographic as well. I've got the 1080p TV, 5.1 surround sound, make enough to buy several DVDs a month.
I wont buy a bluray player at the current price points. Give me a call when they are ~$100 and can play DIVX .avi files like my $35 DVD player does.
Also, a $5 premium on discs is acceptable. The problem is, at the local walmart DVDs run from $13 for popular stuff thats pretty new and $5 for stuff a few years older (yes, they also have shelves of $20 DVDs, but why bother?).
I am not paying $30+ for bluray discs. Especially since I can't back them up in any reasonable way.
Re:It's being pushed anyway (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's being pushed anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quality is part of the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, the latter of which was done as a film transfer... and had dirt all over the film and jittered throughout the entire movie, along with the film grain, which seemed completely out of place for an animated feature.
Sure that wasn't a bootleg recorded with a camera in the theater? ^_-
Re:Personally... (Score:2, Interesting)
Huh? I'm not interested in Blu-Ray at all because the quality I get on a 46" 1080p LCD and a normal DVD player is more than adequate for me. But what is this about Blu-Rays discs taking 90+ seconds to start watching??? Is that true? If so, why?? I agree, if I were contemplating getting a Blu-Ray player, that alone would make me think twice. Or even think twelve times.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:DVD is poor by comparison, but is "good enough" (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a large-screen 1080-capable projection TV, but it does not have HDMI inputs. I wish that I had better quality, but with only analog inputs, Blu-Ray movies may limit the quality that I can view so that it is little better than DVD.
If Blu-Ray could actually guarantee me better picture quality, I would buy it. But, instead, their idiotic copy-protection schemes are having the opposite effect. Maybe when my current television dies and I am forced to upgrade to something with HDMI, or maybe when Blu-ray players drop to $50, I might pick one up. Until then, there is no compelling reason to do so.
Re:DVD is poor by comparison, but is "good enough" (Score:3, Interesting)
You will be as you buy more new titles. The DVD publishers are starting to pull a sneaky stunt to make the HD offerings look better. No longer are DVDs being maxing out the video bandwidth to get the best they can out of the limited storage space. Over the last year I've seen the main title use less and less space, and we're not talking about them filling the disc up with shit ads and other crap. Some discs are barely about DVD5 limits. Remove some of the crap and you get your main title uncompressed comfortably on a DVD5.
I first noticed this on awful picture BBC DVDs. When I looked at what was on the disk, I couldn't believe they were taking the piss. But following on from that I soon noticed they were not alone. Movies were doing the same thing!
Give it another year or two, and DVDs will mysteriously look far worse than people remembered. And it won't just be the masses getting used to HDTV broadcasts.
Now, if you'll excuse me, my wife wants to swallow my load :D
Re:Price? (Score:3, Interesting)
then you should rent, until the price/premium goes down. and it will.
if you don't like renting, remember that anydvdHD from slysoft now handles BD+ encrypted discs. combo a Blu-ray burner, (i think they're down to $400 now) plus the cost of anydvdhd well, the price is quite high, 79 euros, for just anydvd with anydvdhd, but still, they're the only guys who've got BD+ cracked at the moment.. add $12 a disc for bulk quantity of a decent grade of BD-r and if you rip 100 movies, you've spent $17 a movie, about the same cost as buying DVD, but getting blu-ray quality.
only problem, dvd shrink won't do HD content... ATI's avivo will encode mpeg2 into h264, and claims to transcode as well, but otherwise there is 'TSReMux' a very user unfriendly application is one of the few that can shrink blu-ray content, there was also a guide for encoding to h264 for PS3/xbox 360 playback here http://www.videohelp.com/guides/ripbot264-ps3-xbox-360-h-264-encoding-guide-id1079#1079 [videohelp.com]
oh well, someone will come along and write a easy to use blu-ray shrink app soon, the economy is already there for the pirate willing to do the leg work, of h264 transcoding.
knowing the county i live in, soon there will be a guy doing DVDs for $3 or blu-ray for $20 a pop, and when the price for him/her goes down, so will the blu-ray pirate discs, and most likely i would just have to ask my county case manager who does it because 'everybody' knows who does it. yeah that sounds wierd, but nobody cares in rural areas. copyright that's for fancy places like Hollywood.
Re:Personally... (Score:3, Interesting)
to defend the OP, the PS3 is by far the fastest Blu-Ray player, and that has a "supercomputer" core to handle the JVM.
what would you suggest is the problem (and accounts for the PS3 speed)?
Blu-ray still has a good chance, despite bad press (Score:1, Interesting)
While not a coward, I am Lazy so I won't register here.
Still, this article is not fully accurate and too many people think Blu-ray NEEDS HDTV. While it is a significant boost, Blu-ray movies will still look better than DVDs, AND contain more advanced special features like Picture in Picture and web content and more.
Now Blu-ray is still in its infancy, and anyone who says they will never buy Blu-ray simply can't see what will happen in the future. As HDTV sales go up, despite the declining economy, Blu-ray sales too have gone up. In fact, Blu-ray adoption is FASTER than DVD adoption was in its infancy! Blu-ray is actually making a difference already. The first quarter DVD sales went down, as expected. However the Blu-ray sales were large enough to boost the entire Home Media market above last year! Already Blu-ray is doing the job of replacing DVD as it starts to decline with age.
For now, Blu-ray will remain a luxury item, and anyone buying it is still considered an early adopter. However, time will tell, and it is more likely than not that Blu-ray will become the norm, especially since Blu-ray players will play your existing DVDs, and upsample them as well.
The average lifespan of a TV is 5 years. The expected lifespan of Blu-ray is 10. Even if you don't buy into the HD revolution now, eventually everyone else will.
The main opposition now to Blu-ray is bad press and confusion. Many are not ready or willing to put down that money involved to get Blu-ray, but it is still young, and like DVDs, it too will drop in price significantly. The media coverage tells you digital downloads are the way to go, except digital download sales overall (SD and HD) are less than half of Blu-ray sales.
Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
consumers were very happy to embrace the DVD standard when it came about because it brought a huge jump in quality over VHS
Wrong again.
"Consumers" prefer DVD over tape because tape, the media and the player, is unreliable, bulky, slow (remember rewind?) and ultimately more expensive than DVD. If DVD quality were exactly the same as classic VCR media consumers would have still bought into it.
As far as this Blu-Ray vs. DVD survey result goes, I knew this and told you so some time ago [slashdot.org]. Consumers are not *philes. Where cheap meets "just works" you will find consumers; the rest is just *phile noise.
Anyhow, this whole debate is moot; tapes and spinning disks with die out for distributing commercial content as consumers figure out that "movies on demand" via download is cheaper and "just works" better than any other form of media.
Re:DVD is poor by comparison, but is "good enough" (Score:3, Interesting)
The reason the DVD market took off against the VHS market was two main reasons:
1. You don't have to rewind. (or fast forward).
2. Video rental stores no longer had to buy a special copy to be rented out. (those VHS tapes cost the stores over $100 each in some movies). They would just buy the DVD at $20, and rent it out at $3-$5 each. Way faster payback, way higher profits. (and smaller, you could fit more of them on the shelf..)
Give me a good tube HDTV and maybe I'll bite (Score:5, Interesting)
I was recently really into the idea of getting an HDTV, but I've decided I don't really care. For one thing, if I buy an LCD HDTV, my SD video game systems (N64, NGC, PS2), which are important to me, will look pretty crappy on it and have new-found lag, thus making them suck balls. If I buy a Plasma HDTV you have to deal with burn in and annoyances like slowly fading menus and such - that seems even worse to me. So the best option is still a tube TV and, uh, I've got one. LCD TVs suck due to pixillation and lag. Plasma TVs suck due to burn in. Tube TVs are big and heavy, and that sucks a little, but they look great and have no lag. I'll take it.
Re:Prices Don't Help (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:DVD is poor by comparison, but is "good enough" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:DVD is poor by comparison, but is "good enough" (Score:3, Interesting)
You can buy a Bluetooth Remote for the PS3, that is actually quite good, (no line of sight required).
Also, if you have a PSP, you can use that as a remote too, useful if you are in the kitchen, and using it to control your PS3's music playback.
But yes, unless they make a universal Remote with bluetooth support, its a bit of a bug...
However, the PS3's BluRay, DVD (upscaling), DivX/Xvid support is actually very good.... plus.. its a great games machine.. whough, admittelly i am more addicted to some of the games that have been downloaded (for cheap) than disc based ones.