The worlds of home entertainment and the Internet took one step closer to each other this week when Samsung announced that they are integrating YouTube video playback into almost all of the their Blu-Ray players.
Most of Samsung’s Blu-rays come with Internet connectivity and some models even with wireless. Using the built-in menu system you can now access YouTube and watch your favourite video clips directly on your TV. Samsung is no stranger to the idea of streaming video to its players and in the USA it has agreements with Blockbusters and Netflix for streaming films to their Blu-ray players.
Samsung are naturally pleased with this announcement and Robert Shaw one of their home entertainment people commented “We know our consumers want access to multi-platform content, and the addition of YouTube to our Blu-ray players aims to provide this to them – from the comfort of their living room.”
At the same time Samsung have also announced support for the MKV format. The what? format you may well ask. MKV is part of the Matroska format which is a free and open standard for video, audio and pictures. It is intended to be a universal format and is becoming increasingly common for storing HD video files. Since Blu-ray players are all about HD supporting this new HD video format is a good move for Samsung. Also it doesn’t cost them any thing in terms of licenses or patents as Matroska is entirely open in specification, with implementations consisting mostly of open source software.
What this means in reality is that more and more video will be made available in the Internet (legally or otherwise) in this format and you can watch videos using it on your Samsung Blu-ray player.
Samsung say that the YouTube and MKV updates available on all Samsung Blu-ray players excluding model BD-P1580. For information on all Samsung Blu-ray players available visit http://www.theblubutton.com