Tag: hometheater

Oh, So That’s Why Some Blu-ray Discs Don’t Resume

Ashley Bischoff6 Comments

The HD Advisor is a weekly Q-and-A column at highdefdigest.com in which readers can send in questions to which the staff tries to help answer. Anyhow, in this week’s column, they go over why some Blu-ray discs don't support play-resume:

[…] Just to clarify, the lack of a Resume Play option is tied to BD-Java […]. While all BD-Live discs are authored with BD-Java (so they do go hand-in-hand to a certain extent), it’s also possible for discs without BD-Live to share this problem. Java-enabled discs will usually start with a “Loading” icon before the main menu, and tend to take longer to load than non-Java titles. All of Fox Home Entertainment’s James Bond Blu-rays are programmed with BD-Java, even though none have BD-Live content, for example.

I agree that this is a major shortcoming of BD-Java, and I’m flabbergasted that none of the Blu-ray format developers ever gave this issue serious consideration. […]

So, that’s the scoop, apparently; I’m glad it wasn’t just me. (Up until now, I wasn’t quite sure if maybe I just hadn't configured my Blu-ray player quite right.) That aside, though, Blu-ray still offers a phenomenal picture, so I'm going to continue happily buying Blu-ray discs :).

A Quick Primer on Blu-ray Profiles

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I was chatting with some friends last night, trying to explain the scoop on Blu-ray profiles, but I’m not sure I did a terribly good job of it. I've just come across an article at C|Net, though, which does explain Blu-ray profiles pretty well.

(The short answer, though, is that Profile 2.0 is the final one and, if you’re going to buy a Blu-ray player, that’ll be the most future-proof.)

And if you were to get a Blu-ray player, I can also recommend this comparison chart at AVSForum as a good starting point—ostensibly, it’s a table comparing the audio capabilities of various Blu-ray players, but it actually does a good job of summarizing things in general.

In the case of that table, the short answer is that you’d want to get a player with the green-colored cells all the way across its line in the chart. As I write this, and of the players that are currently available, that narrows things down to Panasonic’s DMP BD-55 (the Blu-ray player I have) and Sony’s BDP-S550.