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Microsoft to support Blu-Ray playback on Windows

Just after Toshiba announced their strategy to stop supporting and stop manufacturing HD-DVD drives and media thus abandoning the platform, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer just pointed out that, company is now working to provide a native support for Blue-Ray playback on Microsoft Windows.

There had been a long raise battle between 2 technology giants over the next optical media format, which was suppose to be the next major jump from DVD to the next successor. Microsoft and its allies like NEC and major hardware developer Toshiba supported a format called HD-DVD where as Sony and its allies like Matsushita, Pioneer, Philips, Thomson, LG Electronics, Hitachi, Sharp, and Samsung voted for Blu-Ray format.

The major challenge for Microsoft was slowly but surely the industry kept on going towards the path to accept the Blue-Ray format and the last nail to coffin was when the only hardware developer for HD-DVD, the Toshiba crop decided to abandon the project.

Now after its confirm that HD-DVD is going towards its grave, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, for the 1st time have made an important comment towards the Sony backed Blu-Ray format on a press meet.

“We’ve already been working on, for example, in Windows, device driver support for Blu-ray drives and the like,” said Ballmer, speaking at the Microsoft’s Mix ’08 conference. Ballmer also said that Microsoft is “going to support Blu-ray in ways that are important,” according to a transcript of his remarks posted on the company’s Web site.

All though the PC market already have full 3rd party support on blu-ray format, how ever this can be seen as a positive step from Microsoft towards the much needed platform, their own gaming console, the XBOX 360. Which till date is coming with support for HD-DVD only. Now with the death of HD-DVD, all XBOX users and future buyers would be on look for the full support for Blu-Ray on this platform also.