The format wars are over and Blu-ray won.

Now it's a question of getting that technology in a laptop.

According to Wired, this may be another issue all together. The Blu-ray technology, though highly desirable in a laptop, poses the new issue of intense power consumption from the drive and if the first generation of Blu-ray equipped laptops are any indication, the laptop may not get more than halfway through a movie before running out of juice entirely.

"Blu-ray battery life is obviously a huge concern," says Yankee Group analyst Josh Martin. "If you bought an iPhone and you couldn't watch a two-hour movie, which you barely can now, that would be a huge problem," Martin continued.

To date, laptop manufacturers have avoided revealing the precise effects of Blu-ray playback on battery life. In some cases, battery life topped out at one hour. "The laser that runs the show [in Blu-ray players] is a very high-power laser," notes Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron. This laser also appreciably raises power consumption.

The other element of this equation has to do with the process of decoding data from a Blu-ray disc and converting it into images for the screen. When Blu-ray was first introduced, the task was left to intensive software that gobbled up CPU cycles and power.

"Any time you introduce a new technology like this, the initial products tend to be more power-hungry," McCarron says. "Once you get to a certain point, though, the industry usually starts the refinement process."

According to a spokesman for the Blu-ray Disc Association, some of the power drain issue has been resolved by offloading some of the decoding process to other system hardware, namely a computer's graphics processing unit. New graphics cards from Nvidia and ATI may help with this, but the goal of running 4.5 hours of Blu-ray playback on a single notebook battery charge will still pose a challenge.

So, if you're waiting for a MacBook or a MacBook Pro to feature a Blu-ray optical drive for a high definition movie or two to accompany your next flight, you may have to wait a little while longer.

If you have any thoughts or ideas on this, let us know over in the comments or forums.