LG BH100 HD DVD / Blu-ray hybrid player (merged thread) (1 Viewer)

[Parker Clack]

Yeah, I noticed that Warner Brothers has decided to release their titles with
both an HD DVD and Blu Ray version on the same disc called Total HD to go along with this new player.

Parker

 

[Beery]

But the PROBLEM is that the depth of focus HAS to be that much shallower. This is not an advantage. With a depth below the surface of of 0.6mm the depth of focus can be longer without causing problems. When you force the player to use a more shallow depth of focus by bringing the data closer to the surface the chances of misreads becomes greater, not smaller. When you're focusing at a shallow depth any surface irregularities will tend to affect the light much more than if the focus is at a greater depth.

 

[Frank Laudicina]

Someone please correct if I am wrong, but I thought that Warner's new Dvd disc can be played in all current HD-dvd & Blu-ray players.

 

[Cees Alons]

Yes, it can.
There was an eetsy-teetsy-tiny bit of sarcasm to be found in Parker's post, I think.


Cees

 

[BrettB]

*note to self* never lend Neil any 5" discs.

 

[Ron-P]

Reading over at AVS it seems like this first gen comob-player is a bust. From what I am reading it cannot support iHD which means it will not support all the features of HD-DVD and may indeed even have trouble playing the disks.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...2&page=1&pp=30

Could this be right?

 

[Marko Berg]

I generally despise AVS and the tone of the first post in that thread is enough for me not to want to read any further.

I'll just say that a) it's a few more weeks to launch, and b) it is therefore unlikely people have experimented with a production model. Also, can't such support be added via a firmware update?

 

[Jason Seaver]

I suppose you could add support via firmware, but I would think most people dropping $1200 on a player would really like it to do everything that a $500 player does out of the box.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Err, that's a strange assertion. The shallower the depth of focus, the more out of focus surface irregularities are, and the less they will affect the image seen at the pickup. Remember, the plastic itself acts as part of the optical system, and the greater the depth of plastic the beam is focussed through, the more it affects the pickup. This is precisely why Blu-Ray is able to have a higher bit density than HD-DVD.

 

[Marko Berg]

Multi-channel Dolby TrueHD was not supported by the first-generation Toshiba players out of the box either, but was added later via a firmware upgrade.

Optical HD formats are still in their infancy; I don't think it's realistic to expect the first multi-format player to include all the bells and whistles and still perform flawlessly. I'm happy LG is bringing this product to market sooner rather than later in an attempt to put an end to the format war. Lack of iHD support can be criticized, but for all we know it may have been a carefully made decision in order to give product development time to iron out possible problems.

It seems that lately many threads here at the HTF contain extensive quotes from AVS which has a rather dubious mentality. I realize certain industry insiders maintain a presence there, but really, the thread in question doesn't add anything worthwhile to this discussion.

 

[Wet1]

You guys can even get onto AVS??? They need a MAJOR server upgrade over there!!!

 

[Jason Seaver]

True, True-HD needed a firmware upgrade, but it wasn't an established feature in other, less expensive players. The "In-Movie Experience" on Batman Begins is one of the things that most impresses folks who check out my $450 HD-A1; finding out the LG player can't do it would certainly make it less appealling. If I were walking into Best Buy, I'd want to know why LG's unit, which costs as much as an HD-A2 and a BDP-1200 combined, does less - if anything, you'd think there'd be some savings based on overlapping components. Sure, it may get the capabilities that other HD-DVD players have had for months through a pain-in-the-neck firmware update later, but for all you know, it may not.

I also don't see how LG is necessarily thinking in terms of "putting an end to the format war"; if they're the only ones making a multiformat player, it seems to be in their best interest to prolong it.

 

[Travis Hedger]

How cany they call it HD DVD if it does not support everying that the HD DVD spec defines? Not that I use the special features that much, I am in it for the video and sound. But to have a combo player drop the ball like that is inexcusable.

 

[Sean Bryan]

Tell me about it. They've been bad all week with constant "sever is too busy" messages. It seems like today they put up a couple of mirror sites, but about 30 minutes ago the whole thing seems to have crashed. Trying to go there I just get a "This program cannot display the web page." message from my browser with "the web site may be encountering problems" as one of the possible explanations.

Everyone anxious for a scrap of news about HD DVD and BD from CES is flooding AVS, because that's where the info comes out first. Seems to be too much for them right now. Which sucks because I'm one of those anxious folks.

 

[Larry Sutliff]

I just tried logging onto AVS, and I get a file download instead of the website. No way in heck I'm opening that, as it could be a virus. I wonder what is going on with that site? Maybe an overzealous HD DVD or Blu-Ray fan hacked the site!

 

[Kevin C Brown]

The shallower the focus, the closer that focus is to the surface of the disc, hence the more surface defects affect the data. The original quote is correct. The deeper the data is into the disc, the more out of focus the defects are at the surface, and the less important they become. This is exactly how a lot of the multiformat discs are made. Data at different levels that do not affect the other levels.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

The spacing between the two layers of a DVD-9 is of the same general order as the spacing between the surface of a BD and the first layer, or indeed the first and second layers of a BD-50. If a data layer doesn't affect it, surface defects won't either. This goes back to the original LaserDisc proposal, which provided for a flexible disc 0.1 mm thick as well as a rigid disc 1 mm thick (only very late did they think of gluing two rigid layers together). The thin disc was abandoned because scratches could actually destroy the pit layer (like scratching the lacquer on a CD), but scratches on the under (playing) side were not considered a problem.

 

[Beery]

If you have a blob of dirt on a disc that's the same diameter as the diameter (at the disc surface) of the laser beam that's reading the data it's going to miss the data that's underneath that blob no matter how out of focus the surface dirt is - because the blob completely blocks the beam. That's the case whether the data is shallow or deep within the disc. BUT if the data is deeper the blob has to be bigger in order to block the beam diameter at the surface. With shallow data there's more potential for data loss because tiny specks of dirt have the potential to more effectively block the beam. If the dirt's diameter is smaller than the beam diameter the beam may get enough light past the dirt to read the data, but the shallower the data the more potential for the surface dirt to be in focus enough to block enough light or big enough to block all light - both of which will cause data loss.

 

[GlennH]

It's easy to throw stones at this first combo player's specs. I posted early in this thread that I thought it wouldn't be as good as the best of either format. That's to be expected. And I certainly expected the price to be rather high because they have to pay two sets of royalty licenses or whatever and cover development costs. But I don't want to be too hard on LG because I give them a lot of credit for doing this. It's something a lot of us wanted to see happen and LG did it, sooner than I thought it would happen. We can't get a more refined second generation player until somebody breaks the ice. I personally won't be purchasing it, but I hope it becomes the best-selling HD player out there so other manufacturers quickly get onboard with the idea too.

 

[Chris S]

I'm with Glenn. I'm glad LG stepped upto the plate and finally did something alot of us have been asking for since day one. Even if the unit is a bust I'm glad to see they've broken the ice for others.