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Conceding BR has beaten HD DVD. Now the player problem

E

europeman

Guest
I would like at buying a BR player but I really do not want it to be a PS3. Do not want to wear out the PS3 with games and Movies. Sucks because do not know what to buy that will work going forward.

I believe the major compatibility issues are a move by Sony to fatten their pockets.
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No2 vaporizer
 
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The PS3 is currently the "best" Blu-ray player on the market. If PowerDVD had their **** together I'd recommend that solution, but, since they don't, I can't. No other player is "future proof" (I really hate that term) as the Blu-ray spec is in flux. If you can find a profile 2.0 player (BD Live I believe they're calling it now) then that's your best bet. At LEAST get a profile 1.1 player. But you really want a BD Live player. And at this time, the PS3 really fits the bill. Sorry.
 
NOthing is futureproof

but you would think that looking forward would have been done. What did they think the first and second generation of blu ray would solve all of the issues and no improvements would be needed
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LovelyWendie99
 
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I have no idea what they thought. What irritates me about Blu-ray is that the spec wasn't finished before they rushed it out the door. Now we got this profile 1.x, profile 2.x BS and it's going to piss a lot of consumers off. Myself included even though I have 2 players capable of BD Live. I realize nothing is TRULY "future proof" (which is why I hate that term), but, as far as the most likely candidate for supporting all the future Blu-ray profiles goes, the PS3 is your best bet. If you can find a BD Live player, sweet. But I don't think there are any out yet(I could be wrong, I haven't looked). The whole thing is a mess. That's one of the big things HD DVD had going for it...the spec was finalized and no "updates" are needed.
 
I was able to play my backed up Goodfellas Blu Ray disc last night successfully on my Panasonic BDK30 available at Best Buy. The Panny does a great job of reading BD-R and BD-RE media.

Hope that helps!
 
It only helps him if it's a profile 2.0(aka BD Live) capable player with an ethernet port. Otherwise, not so much. I for one wouldn't want to buy an obsolete player right out of the gate. I'd wait until a "finished" product is available.
 
agreed

I do like the HD movies but the fact is that no player is an option right now. I will probably buy Beowolf in HD DVD and maybe the super friends but probably my last 2 purchases
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Cosplay
 
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I think the BDK50 is going to upgradable to profile 2.0 but check it out to make sure.
 
Their are only 2 choices

Their are only 2 choices, Sony PS3 or a HTPC. DONT waste your money on a standalone player!!

I went with a home built HTPC, it's as close to Future proof as you can get.

You can always upgrade something in the PC, just start with a very good mother board.
 
SamuriHL said:
I have no idea what they thought. What irritates me about Blu-ray is that the spec wasn't finished before they rushed it out the door. Now we got this profile 1.x, profile 2.x BS and it's going to piss a lot of consumers off. Myself included even though I have 2 players capable of BD Live. I realize nothing is TRULY "future proof" (which is why I hate that term), but, as far as the most likely candidate for supporting all the future Blu-ray profiles goes, the PS3 is your best bet. If you can find a BD Live player, sweet. But I don't think there are any out yet(I could be wrong, I haven't looked). The whole thing is a mess. That's one of the big things HD DVD had going for it...the spec was finalized and no "updates" are needed.
Click to expand...

They probably thought, "Hey, here's a way to squeeze even MORE money out of consumers." :bang:

To the OP, I guess I would recommend:

If your very PC literate and don't mind tinkering some, then go HTPC and put up with PDVD for now as it can work for the majority of the disks out there (I would guess 95+%), otherwise buy a PS3.

The last option of course is to just wait a while for the BD spec to become better defined and standalone players to catch up. How long that will be, I don't know.
 
talon95 said:
They probably thought, "Hey, here's a way to squeeze even MORE money out of consumers." :bang:
Click to expand...

Yea, probably. Either that or it was yet another way to push the PS3. "Look, it's the ONLY upgradeable player! Isn't that great?!" Morons.

To the OP, I guess I would recommend:

If your very PC literate and don't mind tinkering some, then go HTPC and put up with PDVD for now as it can work for the majority of the disks out there (I would guess 95+%), otherwise buy a PS3.

The last option of course is to just wait a while for the BD spec to become better defined and standalone players to catch up. How long that will be, I don't know.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure I can fully recommend the HTPC route at this point. PowerDVD being the biggest pain in the ass player I've ever seen. If you can live with the constant bugs, problems, and working your ass off to get the latest supposedly fixed versions that introduce more bugs, then sure, HTPC is not bad. Plus you'll have to live with analog audio until the geniuses in the PC industry figure out that hey, wow, this HDMI thingie can actually transmit more than 2 channels of audio! HOLY SNIKES! If you go SP/DIF you'll deal with downmixed DTS and/or DD with a max rate of 1.5mbps(dts) or 640kbps(dd). So no, HTPC is no panacea of Blu-ray playback. There are huge benefits, to be sure. AnyDVD HD being the obvious big one. Being able to remux your discs so they take up less storage and putting all your movies in ISO format on one big ass drive is nice. But, right now with PowerDVD being our best playback option, I'm loathe to recommend that route to anyone who wants hassle free playback.
 
Sony loses money on each PS3 sold don't they?

If this is the case... if one were to purchase one strictly for BD playback, I wonder how many Blu-Ray discs an individual would have to buy for Sony to actually start making money on the individual sale of the PS3... assuming no games were purchased.

At any rate, I'd hold off until a good open source playback solution implements the proper codecs for unencrypted/ripped HD media. I know VLC (http://www.videolan.org) is making good progress, but they're not quite there yet with the audio decoding (i.e. TrueHD et. al). As I understand it, this is mostly due to the fact that the specs for the audio codecs are pretty tightly-boxed.

I agree with whoever said don't waste your money on a standalone player. Either purchase the PS3 which is fully upgradeable to newer profiles (well, presumably it is... it better *damned* well be or we'll have many MANY angry and disillusioned consumers), or wait a bit until an open source solution is realized (at which point we will *definitely* need a BD+ solution from SlySoft, because you can bet your sweet ass that BD+ will become quite popular with the studios at this point). Unfortunately the second option requires a bit of technical saavy.

Innit fun? Thanks a lot Sony.

HTH,

-SG
 
If you can hold off a few months and your still interested in HDDVD I would.

Initial PS3 (loyal PS fans) purchase has passed so next phase is Physical players. HDDVD players outsell all the Blu-Ray ones combined by a large factor.

Consumers aren’t silly once the word gets out not to buy players as they are not ready or upgradeable they wont buy them (2.0 by end 2008), they will also hear that HDDVD ones are!

Plus I don't see Paramount etc moving until their contract has finished early 2009.

Also Paramount group has a very good film line up which a few are shown here:

Atonement, There will be blood, Cloverfield, Bee Movie, Beowolf
The spiderwick chronicles, Iron Man, Madagasca 2
Kung fu Panda, Sweeney Todd, Kite Runner, American Gangster
The Ruins, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,
Case 39, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Star Trek (new Movie)
theres plenty more.

See this is Paramount groups year!

Theres more than enough in there to keep me well happy.
 
I read this on another forum and I thought it summarized things pretty well about problems with HD HTPCs.

#1. The PC is not compliant with HD Deep Color despite what your
display's capabilities are. No current PC will support HDMI 1.3
because there is no OS that can handle 36-bit color depths required
for Deep Color. No Microsoft OS, including Vista, can accommodate
more than 24-bit RGB color.

#2. Newer, HD quality, audio is not possible on a PC for 2 reasons.
The first has to do with playback downsampling and the second has to
do with hardware (see #3). PowerDVD downsamples HD audio from both
Blu-ray and HD DVD discs to 48KHz / 16-bit (standard DVD quality).
When Cyberlink PowerDVD Product Manager, Louis Chen, was asked about
this in an interview, he said, "digital output without protection is
not possible due to AACS requirement. Digital and analogue output
with protection (HDMI) is also not possible due to lack of an
internal secure audio path in a Windows PC."

#3. There is no way to convey a 7.1 digital HD audio signal from a
PC to a receiver. Even if PowerDVD or another software company decided to
forgo downsampling audio or develop a secure mechanism for
transmission, you still could not take advantage of HD audio. While
HDMI can handle the newest digital HD audio with 8 channels, all
current HDMI output solutions on a PC are from a Toslink cable.
Therefore, there is no way to get digital HD audio to the receiver.
Toslink or Coaxial SPDIF cannot carry a full DD+ signal, DTS-HD HR
signal, full 5.1 PCM signal, TrueHD signal or DTS-HD MA signal.
 
HD DVD is better than Blu-Ray simply because the standard was finalized

I have conceded that Blu Ray will defeat HD DVD. I held out hope even after Warner committed to Blu Ray but the recent news is absolutely terrible. Best Buy promoting Blu Ray. I take the Best Buy with a grain of salt but I am the exception and most people will buy based on what they promote.

Now that I have conceded what do I buy? Well I am going to sit back and buy nothing because I do not want to burn out the PS3 using it for both. With BD Live well are back to square one with 600-700 equipment to purchase because the Blu Ray did not get their act together.

The crap of earlier adopters getting screwed is crap. I have had a CD Player from 1985 that had no issues whatsoever until I disposed of it last year. Only because I did not use it anymore. Earlier adopters of DVD players had no issues because Blu Ray has screwed the consumer period.
 
3 out of how many

The bottom line is the Blu Ray group had no idea of where they were going when they pushed it out. They rushed it out because they were behind plain and simple.

The players were not ready for prime time. I would buy one tomorrow but which one. The one I buy is already obsolete. The generation of players are almost like going back to square one and the beginning in terms of maturity and pricing
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Kitchen Measures
 
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