The most annoying thing about Blu-Ray (sorry, it's another Warner Bros. thing!) (1 Viewer)

[John H Ross]

I've been watching movies on BD for about 2 months now and I must say I am very impressed. They really are THAT good.

Unfortunately there's one thing I knew would bug me, and it really is the ONLY thing that bugs me:

I really, really dislike the way that Warner Bros BDs go straight to the movie without first giving the user the option to set the required audio format. It would be fine if the audio defaulted to the best setting - normally Dolby TrueHD in the case of WB - but it doesn't.

I actually dread the process of putting on a WB disc, muting the sound, starting the movie, then going to the pop-up menu, changing the audio, then backing up, unmuting the sound and starting the movie again. You can't even PAUSE the disc while you navigate the menu, you have to spoil the impact of those first few seconds by fumbling around.

Okay I'm sure other folks really don't care, but I like to get that BANG impact with the music and the logos and everything else when a movie starts (ironically it's the WB logo itself that you're most likely to miss whilst changing audio, not a very wise PR move by the studio!!)

So my request to Warners is this: Please do what (as far as I know) every other studio does and let's have some menus before the movie starts!

THANKS!

 

[CraigF]

Correct me if I'm wrong here, because I have a lousy memory: if the WB default audio selection was lossless, and your AVR didn't handle the lossless format, wouldn't you just get the core audio? If so, why wouldn't WB choose lossless as the default? That should suit everybody. [I am unable to test this "core" concept with my AVR.]

 

[James Ryfun]

I couldn't disagree more. About wanting a menu at the beginning of a disc, anyway. I can see your point as far as configuring the sound goes, but I would much rather jump right into a movie, changing the sound option on the fly, and getting right into the film itself.

No new menus, please.

 

[John H Ross]

But you're NOT getting right into the film itself. You're getting right into the process of calling up a menu, changing the audio (which causes an audio dropout), closing the menu and then picking up the movie from the, what, 10 second mark!

It doesn't happen that way in cinemas (ok, "theatres") like that and we are trying to reproduce the theatrical experience here!

Again, I'd be happy if the sound defaulted to the best setting - no need to change it and therefore no need for the menu - but as it stands, well it's disappointing when every other studio lets you set the film up BEFORE you watch it.

 

[Ron-P]

I also perfer the menu to pop up first and not have the film auto-start. I like to put in the disc and let my FP warm up for about 10 minutes before I start the film.

 

[John H Ross]

That's an excellent point.

 

[Edwin-S]

The amount of time it takes to set up the audio when the movie auto starts is minimal. I don't bother muting when I make the change. I can handle it either way. If WB wants to auto start their films then I don't have a problem with it. It's also fine with me if other studios use a static menu before the film starts. What I hate is the reams and reams of trailers that a person has to wade through to get to the feature. Trailers should be accessible through the extras menu only. I always check what extras are available. If there is a trailer that I'm interested in then I will select it and watch it, otherwise don't waste my time making me watch trailers that I couldn't care less about. That is the one nice thing about WB's auto start: no worthless trailers to endure.

 

[TravisR]

I'd rather have the disc go to the main menu too but I'm not that concerned about it either.

 

[John H Ross]

Oh I completely agree!!

 

[CraigF]

Agree it's not a big deal for most people. Pressing the audio button on the remote to cycle through the tracks isn't too disruptive to me, but John is really into the soundtracks IIRC so it sure isn't optimum.

I used this "auto-start lossy default" as a hint of the apparent WB lossless schizophrenia back a bit. I don't recall it went over well...LOL.

 

[Edwin-S]

Personally, I also think that the issue of needing to manually select the Dolby True HD track is going to quickly be a thing of the past. Even now, I'm noticing that more often than not the default and only available English track is either Dolby True HD or DTS Master Audio.

The only place this issue will continue to raise it's head is when the original theatrical sound mix is included. A lot of times the original mix is being put on the disc using one of the lossy formats. Unfortunately, not a lot of discs are including the original sound mix.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

It probably doesn't bug me quite as much as it does John, but I agree. Warner should either give us an easy way to change the audio before the movie (auto) starts or simply default to the best quality, original soundtrack.

However, I'm not too sure about a DD core being passed out for Dolby TrueHD though. I had once thought that was the case, but was told that's not how it actually works. It works that way for DTS-HD/MA w/ the DTS core, but not so sure w/ Dolby TrueHD (and whether the included DD track is actually in the "core").

Still, I suppose most players should be able to transcode Dolby TrueHD into DD for output even if it's not actually passing a core.

_Man_

 

[Edwin-S]

Well, I'm not sure if it is a "core" or a shadow track, but I have discs that contain only a Dolby THD track. On my system the PS3 passes those tracks as Dolby Digital 5.1. I suspect every Blu ray player does the same. There would be a lot of pissed off people if the only track on there was Dolby THD and people couldn't hear it due to an inability to downrezz.

 

[Brandon Conway]

Good grief, it's not hard to access the pop-up menu, select the different audio stream, and hit chapter skip back. It takes all of 15 seconds.

 

[FranklinC]

I don't really see any benefit to NOT having a menu pop up first, and having a lesser audio track as the default just makes no sense. Frankly, the reasons given so far against menus ("I like to jump right into a movie", "I don't mind changing the audio while the movie is playing") seem kind of weird to me. I agree with John that it is annoying to those of us who want to tweak audio, captions, and such before the movie starts.

Both of these "features" remind me of early WB DVDs, and that went away pretty quickly, IIRC. This will too, thankfully.

Why would it be any problem to have a menu come up first, just like 100% of modern DVDs? If you want to start the movie right away, just press the start button, right? I just don't see a downside to having menus first.

 

[CraigF]

You might be right there. With a PS3 as my player and HDMI to my AVR, I may not have all the audio output options some have. IIRC I could not properly handle the lossy audio cores when I tried several months ago as an experiment. If the Dolby TrueHD cores don't exist...well, that's the other explanation why it didn't work!

If such lossy cores don't exist, then that might explain why almost all my Dolby TrueHD BDs also have DD5.1 tracks, otherwise one would say they're superfluous. I say "almost all" because, according to my notes, The Professionals only has TrueHD. I'm sure not saying my notes are perfect...

Edit: I see Edwin-S covered this ...

 

[Wayne_j]

I don't mind auto play on movies, but Warners goes too far with the Sarah Connor Chronicles TV Series. Those discs auto play every episode on the disc.

 

[Dale MA]

I just hit pause and then press menu when the WB logo appears.

 

[John H Ross]

Sure, it's not hard. But it's also not necessary.

 

[John H Ross]

How are you changing audio while the disc is paused?

The pop-up menu doesn't work on my Panasonic BD50 when the disc is paused. You can access the "Top Menu" but unfortunately you can't change the audio options from there (which is another ridiculous non-feature!!)

It's a pain that (presumably) we'll have to mess around with the Matrix movies like this. I just hope they get their act together before they do anything with Lord Of The Rings!!