Today CyberLink released what might be the most confusing press release I have ever tried to read. Unfortunately, the various news articles say little more. The announcement basically says that CyberLink is going to be selling PowerDVD and PowerCinema for Linux (specifically targeting netbooks) with support for high definition media. At first glance, it sounds like Linux is getting support for Blu-Ray playback, but the longer you look at it, the more questions appear. After a little research, here are what I believe are the answers:

• Is Blu-Ray coming to Linux? As far as I can tell, not through this announcement. Although the press release makes a big deal of high definition support, there is no mention of Blu-Ray. More importantly, though, the list of supported formats for the software only includes one of the three codecs that all Blu-Ray players are supposed to support.
• Doesn’t Canonical already sell PowerDVD? Yes.
• So what does high definition mean? I suppose it means high definition video files you might download from the web…
• Why are they pitching this to low end machines with tiny processing power to decode the video, tiny low resolution screens, and no optical drive? Don’t ask me.
• Is this news? Not that I know of.

If I got anything wrong here, please let me know. As far as I can tell, though, this is really a non-event, since HD playback on Linux is nothing new.

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