BD-Live into 2010 (1 Viewer)

[RickER]

Originally Posted by Simon Howson



Surely this could be fixed with a firmware upgrade?

Thats what i hoped for. But a friend of mine, who still has the disc has told me its still a slow load on his Sony 360. Slower than most JAVA discs. I guess it keeps looking for an internet connection, even on players that are not hooked up, and have the internet turned off of the player.
Starship Troopers, another disc that is a problem with Sony players, and a movie from Sony no less. But a memory stick in the back fixes that. To much JAVA, and to many BD live gizmos that slow down the act of watching the movie = no fun.

Once again, i am talking worst case discs. I can live with a 30 sec. or so load time, and thats all it takes for most discs to load. But all it takes is for a studio to do it a little different, and you got headaches on our end. Not to mention, firmware updates from the player manufactures.

My main interest is to watch a movie with the best picture and sound Blu-ray can offer. I dont need moving menus, that take forever to play out before you can select PLAY. I dont need JAVA, BD Live, or forced trailers and ads.

 

[Adam Gregorich]

Use this forum as a chance to tell us what you would like to see, regardless of how you think it could be done.

Thanks James!

 

[David Coleman]

BD- Live has some features I like. My favorites have been the IMDB hookup on WOLVERINE (though incomplete, usually stick to cast and major crew credits, missing others) and the Sony MOVIE IQ (though the area on screen is too large).

I think those are the best features and the fact they are constantly updated is fantastic. MOVIE IQ is more involving though. Some of the downloads are ok, i've personally saved the LORD OF THE RINGS triolgy trailer for future viewing. The Paramount Saffire Series trailer is alright but poorly implemented, it should be voluntary.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Originally Posted by RickER

My main interest is to watch a movie with the best picture and sound Blu-ray can offer. I dont need moving menus, that take forever to play out before you can select PLAY. I dont need JAVA, BD Live, or forced trailers and ads.

That is exactly how I feel. I have a home theater to watch movies, not fancy menus or to participate in online chats via BD Live. A studio's #1 priority when authoring a BD should be to ensure it loads quickly and without error, not seeing how cute they can make animated menus. Has anyone ever complained about or refused to purchase a disc because it just had a plain menu system?

 

[Cees Alons]

The current BD+ implementation in a BD-player does exactly what we make sure to have switched off in our e-mail clients, and rightfully so: (1) it plays a script off the individual disc without the owner being able to avoid it, and (2) it tries loading content from the internet without us being able to influence the parameters.

I remember that it was useless to discuss the safety aspects of the new BD+ specs here, when they were changed, because the "format-war" was going on and everyone took those discussions in that context. I even remember our member who argued that no BD-player had an internet connection (unlike most HD DVD-players) and "the subject was moot" therefore.
However, it has always been an extremely bad decision to add that functionality to the BD+ specs. Of course we can trust most of the big studios not to brick our players or gather individual information about our viewing habits, but there has been an active DivX concept in the past, and much more recently a big studio willfully did infect PCs playing their CDs (and went on denying and playing it down at first). And bugs are also possible, unfortunately.

Bottom line is: this is so potentially dangerous and unwanted, that I refuse to have an internet connection on, to my player, when starting up a BD-disc. (The involuntary individual script that is played I have to accept for now, but I won't play discs of which the producer is somewhat unclear or unknown to me.)

I use the internet-connection (temporarily) to upload new firmware and, like Parker and Scott, I buy my BDs (I currently own 251) to watch a film. What I can get in excess, I will and do weigh in individual cases.


Cees

 

[Michael Reuben]

Originally Posted by RickER

Dont even get me started on T2. My Sony 350 took 7 or 8 minutes to load the movie. I dont even have that player hooked up to the internet. I LOATH that disc...sold it.

Originally Posted by Simon Howson



Surely this could be fixed with a firmware upgrade?

Firmware isn't the issue. It's the sheer amount of Java programming stuff on the T2 disc. Van Ling has a well-deserved reputation for pushing the medium when it comes to designing a disc, whether it's DVD or Blu-ray. So if you want to see both the potential and the excruciating limitations of BD-Java and BD-Live, the T2 disc is the finest demonstration available. No matter how many firmware upgrades are released, it will still be a painfully slow experience on any player that isn't powered by a supercomputer. And that's one of the inherent problems with relying on BD-Live to deliver anything other than simple features.

Want another good example? Check out Tropic Thunder. Certain extended features are available only via BD-Live. The result is that I've never seen them, because they take too long to download.

Think of it is as the "stare at your watch" principle. A feature may sound great on paper, but if you're checking the time while you're waiting for it to appear on the screen, the "wow" factor evaporates.

 

[Chad R]

I know that interactivity is a big carrot that most studios want to chase, but I just don't think it's going to work in the current set-up. It's hard to be too interactive with a player with very few controls. It's hard to have an interactive chat via BD-Live when the player doesn't have a keyboard. It's hard to play games on a standard BD player without a good control.

But even if you had all of that, I don't think BD-Live is going to appeal to many people in the same way DVD-ROM content didn't really appeal to us. With that, we did have access to a keyboard and controller and we still didn't care (at least I never did and I don't see much of it anymore).

I think that's because there's times we want to interact and there's times we don't. Movies have been around long enough that we're comfortable with it being a non-interactive entertainment. If you consider our modern digital entertainment choices are like a summer camp, there are plenty of activities for us to DO, like swimming and boating and archery (internet and video games), but every night we liked sitting around the campfire to be TOLD a scary story. That's what movies are in our new digital age, the time when we can surrender ourselves to an activity where someone else has the control and takes us on a ride.

But since you really can't go back and tell your bosses to do nothing (I know how well that goes over), I do have a suggestion. BD-Live should offer more of what we want from a movie experience, namely the ability to watch something. Why not things like premiering trailers exclusively to BD owners? For instance, the recent Harry Potter BD had the first pseudo-trailer for the next film in the series actually on the disc itself. Why not when the first official trailer hits, BD owners get the first look? Or other exclusive things to watch. Star Trek could offer the ability to watch fan vids, things like that.

In short, I watch TV to watch, I hop on the internet to interact. The two need not be the same.