Regretting BluRay right now.. (trouble with 2012) (1 Viewer)

[Ron-P]

I would go with a PS3 if you buy a stand alone player. I have put 300+ Blu's though mine (many of them rentals) and have not had a single disc playing issue yet, including 2012.

 

[Rick Thompson]

Originally Posted by Worth

Forced previews and ads aren't exclusive to blu-ray - many DVDs are the same.

Except in nearly every case, on a DVD you simply press "menu" and you're past them.

 

[Brandon Conway]

Originally Posted by Rick Thompson

Except in nearly every case, on a DVD you simply press "menu" and you're past them.

The same is true for Blu-ray, in my experience.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

Originally Posted by Brandon Conway




The same is true for Blu-ray, in my experience.

That has not been my experience. On numerous titles, I have to continuously press the chapter advance button to get by each of the previews. Pressing "menu" or "top menu" just gives me an error message saying the operation is not allowed. It can be very annoying, but certainly not enough for me to go back to SD-DVD.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Originally Posted by Rick Thompson

Except in nearly every case, on a DVD you simply press "menu" and you're past them.

I'm pretty sure that's not true. I recall there are occasional ones that needed the chapter skip to skip pass each and every preview -- probably mainly the Disney titles -- just like some BDs.


Offhand, the only BDs I can recall not being able to skip pass the previews at all are a few rentals -- and I'm surmising those may be rental-only copies (vs retail versions that may not have the same issue), and that may become the future of BD rentals. I haven't put this hypothesis to the test yet -- just a tiny bit of casual/anecdotal observation for some relatively recent rentals (from Blockbuster Online) -- but I may do so at some point.


Actually, now that I think of it, there may even have been an occasional DVD that wouldn't allow chapter skipping, but needed the more cumbersome fastforward scan, but I'm not too sure now. That's what I had to do for the few BD rentals that wouldn't even allow chapter skips for the forced previews.


_Man_

 

[PaulDA]

I've had the issue with BD and SD DVD and HD DVD. It depends entirely on the authoring of the disc, not the format.


Also, I have some concert videos (on SD DVD) that do not allow pausing. You can fast forward, skip, rewind, skip backwards and stop--you cannot pause. Extremely irritating when the phone rings and I don't want to miss anything. I have no idea why this is so nor have I seen it with movies, but it annoys the hell out of me.

 

[Hollywoodaholic]

I've watched three retail BDs in the past few days that had forced previews you couldn't skip by with either menu button, but had to fast forward or chapter skip through. Up in the Air and the Kelly's Heroes/Where Eagles Dare were two of them. It's truly annoying.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Originally Posted by Hollywoodaholic

I've watched three retail BDs in the past few days that had forced previews you couldn't skip by with either menu button, but had to fast forward or chapter skip through. Up in the Air and the Kelly's Heroes/Where Eagles Dare were two of them. It's truly annoying.

Yeah, needing to chapter skip them is annoying, but a few somewhat recent rental BDs I tried even killed that and required the more cumbersome fastforward scan. Can't remember which ones offhand, but I'll take note going forward. Not sure if I've come across any retail BDs that bad yet.


_Man_

 

[OliverK]

Eric,


when you watch movies on a projector going back from Blu-Ray to DVD won't do, the difference to DVD quality (and to streamed content) is just too high.


Regarding sytandalone players: I have an older Sony BD350 that I upgraded once over the course of 2 years and it has played EVERY movie I fed it (about 150 I would guess).


So get a dedicated player and end the suffering that imo is inevitable if you want to use a PC to just watch Blu-Rays.


With regard to manufacturers I do prefer Pioneer and Oppo but Sony and Panasonic also have great players, the PS3 is also an option and by sheer numbers alone probably the best with regard to support and compatibility.

 

[TonyD]

Originally Posted by Man-Fai Wong



Yeah, needing to chapter skip them is annoying, but a few somewhat recent rental BDs I tried even killed that and required the more cumbersome fastforward scan. Can't remember which ones offhand, but I'll take note going forward. Not sure if I've come across any retail BDs that bad yet.


_Man_

"rental exclusive" versions do this, these are discs with only the movie and NO MENU. fast forward only.

 

[Scott!]

I'm on my second PS3 and love it. I bought the slim model because the fan was so much quieter than the original, but I've never had any playback issues with either one of them. My Samsung player (don't remember the model number...I think it's the BDP-1600 but could be wrong) works OK but loads a lot slower than the PS3.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Yeah, I think I only had one somewhat minor playback issue w/ one disc from Mad Men Season 1 on my PS3 before, and I rarely updated the software. Only updated it for DTS-HD/MA playback (that was originally missing) a long while back and then a couple other times to test/try some other non-BD-related things.


BD-Live titles could sometimes take a long while to load even on the PS3, but that was when I kept it enabled/connected. I suspect it'd load much faster for those titles if I had disabled BD-Live before -- that's what I do now w/ the Panny BD60, and it seems to load at a reasonable pace even for BD-Live titles w/ that disabled (although I'd certainly like to see it load faster).

Originally Posted by TonyD

"rental exclusive" versions do this, these are discs with only the movie and NO MENU. fast forward only.

Not sure about all rental exclusive versions, but IIRC, most/all(?) of the ones I've seen have some very basic, barebones menus w/ no extra features. I just watched Invictus last night, and that's apparently a Warner rental exclusive (from Blockbuster Online). It had a barebones menu -- and still had the popup timeline thing during pauses. Not sure if it actually had forced previews since I didn't see any by the time I got back in front of the display (after preloading the disc) -- and I didn't get around to fully reloading the disc to check.


_Man_

 

[TonyD]

it has a pop up menu but there is nothing there but a language option, there is NO chapters at all there.

 

[PaulDA]

Originally Posted by Scott!

I'm on my second PS3 and love it. I bought the slim model because the fan was so much quieter than the original, but I've never had any playback issues with either one of them. My Samsung player (don't remember the model number...I think it's the BDP-1600 but could be wrong) works OK but loads a lot slower than the PS3.

How much quieter? I have my PS3 in another room (the wonders of Bluetooth) but I'd like to get another player at some point and other than the fan noise, I quite like my PS3.

 

[Scott!]

Originally Posted by PaulDA




How much quieter? I have my PS3 in another room (the wonders of Bluetooth) but I'd like to get another player at some point and other than the fan noise, I quite like my PS3.

It's incredibly quiet compared to the original. The only time I hear the fan is when I'm taking out a disc I've just watched, and that's not even bad. Whatever Sony did when they made the slim model was a huge improvement.

 

[hampsteadbandit]

I've reviewed over 60 Blu-rays for HTF and played at least 200 more, and the only disc that gave me trouble in a Panasonic BD-50 was Lionsgate's Daybreakers



I had problems getting Daybreakers to run on my LG-BD370 standalone player - which is not connected to the internet as my PC is at the other end of my house


initially, the film would not load past the menu, and this took literally minutes for the menu to load..


its not too much hassle to move the LG player and display (LG 32" panel) into my PC study to plug into the broadband connection, as its much lighter than the old CRT displays, so a firmware update was in order


but even with the latest firmware, it was incredibly slow to load, so slow my display would go into "sleep mode"


once loaded, I really enjoyed this film, but was glad it was a rental Blu-Ray as none of the 160+ Blu-Ray movies in my collection suffer this problem

 

[Michael Reuben]

Originally Posted by hampsteadbandit .

 

[hampsteadbandit]

"This was noted in my ."



Michael, can I ask why is it so slow to load?


It is something to do with Java?

 

[Michael Reuben]

Originally Posted by hampsteadbandit ."[/b]



Michael, can I ask why is it so slow to load?


It is something to do with Java?

It's almost always something to do with Java. We really need someone like Van Ling, who's actually programmed Java for Blu-ray, to break it down for us, but generally the more features the producers cram onto a disc, the longer the load time. In the case of Daybreakers, there's that routine that checks the internet for an update at startup -- and this one really does check. Even if your player isn't connected, there's a pause right there while the code figures out that there's no connection.


Then there's the BonusView stuff for the PIP display, along with the BD Touch and MetaMenu code -- all of which isn't something I've seen on previous Lionsgate discs. As far as I can tell, all of that stuff gets loaded, whether or not you intend to use it. I think that's most of the delay right there.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Originally Posted by Man-Fai Wong

Yeah, needing to chapter skip them is annoying, but a few somewhat recent rental BDs I tried even killed that and required the more cumbersome fastforward scan. Can't remember which ones offhand, but I'll take note going forward. Not sure if I've come across any retail BDs that bad yet.


_Man_

Well, just watched Book of Eli on rental from Blockbuster Online last night, and this one is a Warner rental-exclusive disc. And yep, it has the forced previews w/ *both* the menu buttons and the chapter skip buttons blocked. Can only use fastforward scan to move the previews along more quickly, which is cumbersome to say the least since you have to do it for every single preview.


Given how Warner tends to do things and the fact they've moved to rental exclusives, I'm guessing all such discs from them will have forced previews done this way going forward -- and probably the other few I've tried like this were also Warner rental exclusives.


_Man_