Fishing for Blu-Ray news

Last week, one of the lightning talks at the Mobile & Embedded Developer Days was a 10-minute demo of Blu-Ray Disc, some titles for which are powered by Blu-Ray Disc Java (BD-J), a Java ME platform for rich interactivity. The presenter showed off Blu-Ray's highly attractive menus for the movie War, along with a simple pinball game included with the Blu-Ray Disc of Surf's Up.

There was also a major Blu-Ray event, co-sponsored by Sun, last week in Barcelona. I haven't noticed anyone blogging or putting out press releases about what happened there, so at risk of becoming part of the story, I simply went to our BD-J forum and asked:

I haven't noticed any discussions or blogs about the Sun-sponsored Blu-Ray event in Barcelona. How did it go? Was anything interesting announced?

So far, there's been one interesting reply, posted by francoislionet:

I was there, and really enjoyed it.

The first 1.5 days was presented by Mark Johnson, and he gave us a complete tour of all the API, files, and necessities of creating a BDJ disc. Then came Bill Foote who talked about debugging your application, and using GRIN (his menu creator).

I was not present at the next two days, and was only there on the Friday to watch Sonic's presentation of Scenarist. We also had a long talk about how to certifie your applications (and this is not simple).

Altogether this was a great event. The thing I will remember most is how many time was said "Don't use this, it is bugged on certain players", or "This had not been fully implemented", or "This will be very slow on a Samsung 1000 player"!!!

And I met a lot of great developer from Europe, USA and even Australia.

The feedback about incompatibilities specific to certain devices is something we've heard before about Blu-Ray, and makes an interesting (if somewhat dispiriting) counterpart to the MEDDs' various discussions about fragmentation in the mobile phone space. But for the small number of BD-J developers, this seems like an interesting field to be in right now, especially as Blu-Ray seems to be in the endgame of winning its format war. Now, does anyone else who attended the conference have more to add? Lots of developers are on the BD-J sidelines and would like to hear more.