Several weeks ago Apple seeded out the iPhone OS 3.0 Beta 4 and iTunes 8.2 Pre-release to the developers enrolled in their iPhone developer program. The release had varying minor to major changes to both the iPhone and iTunes but one poster on the MacRumors forum found something pretty interesting in the About iTunes window.

This could all be nothing, or it could mean that Blu-ray support is coming for iTunes in the next version. No one seems to be mentioning the fact it also says “DVD [...] and video-related data” which I don’t see in my current version of iTunes (8.1.1 (10)). So not only does iTunes 8.2 use Gracenote to find audio CD information like we’re used to, it evidently will use Gracenote to identify videos. I’m not sure if this means Apple will eventually make iTunes capable of playing DVDs or not, but I’m pretty sure that’s not a good idea. iTunes is already outgrowing what its name and original purpose describes.

Currently, even with this Blu-ray support, the only way you have access to Blu-ray on Mac currently is to purchase an external Blu-ray drive and even then you’re limited by licensing issues. For the most part you can’t play Blu-ray movies, just utilize the massive storage capacity of the blue-ray disk.

Some might say—myself included for a moment— that perhaps this means the next generation of Macs will ship with blu-ray drives in them. While this might not be as much of a problem with their desktop Macs, the MacBook line would be an interesting challenge—it would require Apple to find a way to cram a blu-ray optical drive into its existing unibody MacBook structure, or possibly even re-invent the unibody for the next generation. While redesigning the unibody seems like a natural step if they want to offer more features in the laptops, the problem of implementing blu-ray is more than hardware. We’ve long known Apple’s opinion of blu-ray licensing as told from Steve Jobs himself:

Straight from El Jobso’s mouth at today’s notebook keynote: “Blu-ray is just a bag of hurt. It’s great to watch the movies, but the licensing of the tech is so complex, we’re waiting till things settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace.” Phil chimed in with “We have the best HD movie and TV options in iTunes.”

—(from Engadget)

From this it’s pretty clear if Apple does decide to include some blu-ray support it will be geared more towards the storage benefits and personal videos. As far as HD movies go, Apple seems to be relying on their iTunes HD platform.

What are your predictions for Apple as they get their feet wet in blu-ray?

This used to be a hard thing to accomplish. I would copy my entire iTunes folder, complete with XML Library files to another drive for backup, then put them back on the new computer careful to put them back in the same exact location they were before. This worked, but it was tedious. The last time I reloaded my MacBook I noticed a new feature in iTunes.

I’m not sure when it appeared, but in the File menu there is an option which says “Back Up to Disc…” When you click this you are presented with a dialog window:

Insert a blank disc (CD or DVD, I assume) and click “Back Up”. iTunes will then save everything to your disc(s)—including playlists, play counts, podcasts, and videos.

Restoring a Library

To restore a library, simply insert your iTunes backup disk while iTunes is running and iTunes takes care of the rest. Please note you will have to authorize the computer to play anything purchased from the iTunes Store.