Can't read blu ray disc

[Ravi Singh]

I have a Panasonic dvd drive in my system , i don't know the exact model name, but its not too much old drive. all other specs are proper, and with windows xp on my system till now my system could read all type of disk and their data. But system can't read the read blu ray disc. Why so? Do i need any special software or hardware to read blue ray disks? Any advice will be helpful to me. Thank you very much for any help.

[Driscoll]

While current optical disc technologies such as DVD, DVD±R, DVD±RW, and DVD-RAM rely on a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue-violet laser instead, hence the name Blu-ray. Despite the different type of lasers used, Blu-ray products can easily be made backwards compatible with CDs and DVDs through the use of a BD/DVD/CD compatible optical pickup unit. The benefit of using a blue-violet laser (405nm) is that it has a shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm), which makes it possible to focus the laser spot with even greater precision. This allows data to be packed more tightly and stored in less space, so it's possible to fit more data on the disc even though it's the same size as a CD/DVD. This together with the change of numerical aperture to 0.85 is what enables Blu-ray Discs to hold 25GB/50GB. Recent development by Pioneer has pushed the storage capacity to 500GB on a single disc by using 20 layers.

According to the Blu-ray Disc specification, 1x speed is defined as 36Mbps. However, as BD-ROM movies will require a 54Mbps data transfer rate the minimum speed we're expecting to see is 2x (72Mbps). Blu-ray also has the potential for much higher speeds, as a result of the larger numerical aperture (NA) adopted by Blu-ray Disc. The large NA value effectively means that Blu-ray will require less recording power and lower disc rotation speed than DVD and HD-DVD to achieve the same data transfer rate. While the media itself limited the recording speed in the past, the only limiting factor for Blu-ray is the capacity of the hardware. If we assume a maximum disc rotation speed of 10,000 RPM, then 12x at the outer diameter should be possible (about 400Mbps). This is why the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) already has plans to raise the speed to 8x (288Mbps) or more in the future.

More info: Blu-ray FAQ

[Curt]

A normal or the regular pc dvd player won't read a blu-ray disk. It can only be played in a Blu-ray player, such as the PS3 have. Right now PS3 is the best which having the blue-ray player, it's the cheapest Blu-ray player out there, and you can also play games on it. or most players will play the disc but not in its high quality format.

[Eldon]

First Check 2.5 firmware for your player . Some high bitrate Blu-rays won't work on every player, but try using Cyberlink Power DVD 9 which is the best Blu-ray software for CPUs.