The Planetarium

Despite the current economic climate, nearly 10 million Blu-ray disc players were sold in the US in 2008 (a third in the last quarter), and consumers bought 2.5 times as many Blu-ray discs as the year before. As this article points out, the price premium of Blu-ray discs (despite discounting) may be holding back further growth. Or perhaps its because many of the titles available to date do little to explore the potential of the platform over plain DVD.

The potential of the version of the Java programming platform, BD-J, on every player. BD-J is composed of the CDC Java ME profile (which is a subset of the Java SE APIs) plus the Personal Basis Profile, plus a subset of the MHP and the JavaTV API for the TV specifics. Or just get the BD-J API docs all in one go here. So if you already know the Java language and the core APIs, you're going to feel right at home (or sitting comfortably, at least).

This new video guide shows you how to take a Java application (get source), built for Blu-ray, emulate it running on your PC, and then burn a test disc so you can run the app on a real Blu-ray player (like the PS3). It's is an excellent guide as to how to get started with Blu-ray app development.