Introduction to Blu Ray/ Samsung BD-P1000

[Applefiend]

Here's a review of BD and the Samsung player I wrote for a PS3 site. Enjoy, and see if you can spot any deliberate mistakes. *cough*

Samsung BD-P1000 DVD Player Review and BD Introduction

Introduction
The following is a personal review of Blu Ray and the first available player.

I’ve gone through a lot of video formats over the years:



VHS Video tapes, Laser Discs, ten years ago DVD, and now the latest format has turned up, Blu Ray high definition disc. Along the way a few doomed formats such as Phillips Video 2000, Video CD and the rest. After playing with a Blu Ray player for a couple of weeks, I think Blu Ray might be one of the formats to survive, but why even bother with a new format?

Why Blu Ray?

DVD was a great format when it was introduced in 1996, but it was one intended for standard definition TV sets, the only ones available. Seeing a movie broadcast in high definition with faultless sound through one of the new HD broadcast channels, or at your local cinema, it’s not that great knowing you can only take home a version of it intended for old TV sets. Also the copy protection on DVDs has long, long been cracked wide open. Anyone can make a copy of a friends DVD, recompress it and save it to a CD as a DIVX, or copy Playstation or XBox games based around the DVD format. Any DVD can be simply downloaded and burnt, whether it’s a movie or console game.

It’s time for a new format, and a consortium of consumer electronics companies lead by Sony have produced it in Blu Ray. Blu Ray updates the aging DVD technology bringing high definition and huge amounts of storage. Now you can buy copies of movies that rival the quality of the ones at your local cinema, and watch them without teenagers talking on their mobile phones!

The New technologies in that make up Blu Ray

The Blue laser
A standard DVD stores 4.7GB per layer, 8.5 on a dual layer disk. Blu Ray uses a shorter wavelength laser diode than DVD (405mn compared to 650 on DVD). This allows Blu Ray to store 25GB per layer, with the maximum on players available today being 2 layers, 50GB in total. TDK have 200GB disks with 33GB per layer, but don’t expect any home video players to use these disks in the foreseeable future.

Java
DVD disks contain a simple menu system, in contrast Blu Ray has a real programming language, a variation of Java by Sun Microsystems called BD-J. It would be perfectly possible to build a Myst style video game for Blu Ray players, or include mini games with your movie. Sounds and pictures can be linked to menu actions allowing for a much richer user experiance.

Simple Region Coding
DVD has six region codes, and the choice of region codes seems pretty odd. Australia and New Zealand share a region code with South America, but not Europe.

BD Region coding divides the world into three regions:

Region A – Comprising the old NTSC regions mostly)
The Americas(North and South), Japan, East Asia except China

Region B – Mostly the old PAL regions
Europe and Africa

Region C
China, Russia, rest of the world

Hard coat technology
In some ways the BD consortium cheated and put the information on BD disks closer to the surface than DVD disks to get more data capacity. This means scratching early BD disks was real easy, making them unusable, and they had to be placed in protective caddies. TDK came to the rescue with “Durabis” a coating technology that makes BDs as tough as DVDs again. You can take a wire brush to a Blu Ray Disk and it’ll still play. All BD movies have this coating.

New codecs
MPEG2, the standard used by DVD is a great standard, but is some 14 years old now, and was intended for systems with processing power of that time. 14 years is a long time, that’s before the Playstation 1, never mind 2. The latest and greatest codecs to emerge are MPEG-4 H264, and VC-1. The new codecs are so powerful and efficient they can produce output every similar to DVD out of a standard 682MB CD-ROM. Combined with the 50GB storage of a Blu Ray, crystal clear output at very high resolution and frame rate is possible.

MPEG2 H264 is already in use and can be seen at the Apple Quicktime trailers site: http://www.apple.com/trailers/ , and is supported by mobile phones, Sony's own PSP, and Apple's Video iPod.

VC-1 is a codec with 15 companies technology behind it, although it is generally wrongly considered an invention of Microsoft. Microsoft are very behind the codec, it's used in their Windows Media Player, and XBox 360 video game console as it's primary video playback codec.

Both codecs are superb, although MPEG-4 H264 is considered more demanding to decode.

There is also support for lossless audio codecs, with audio quality higher than that used for big budget hollywood movies.

Higher bitrates
Feeding these codecs is the highest bitrates in the industry. Higher than Redbook CD Audio, DVD, or indeed the rival HD DVD format..With the best codecs and the best bitrates, Blu Ray has the potential for the highest image quality around.

HDMI
DVD Players typically used analogue outputs to transfer video and audio to your TV set. So your video starts off being digital, gets converted to analogue, then back to digital, introducing noise. Blu Ray players and the more advanced upconverting DVD players use an interface called HDMI. The data comes off the disk in digital, straight into your TV. It produces much better quality images than component, absolutely pin sharp images where you can see every pixel. Audio is also sent with the picture over hdmi.

The hdmi currently used to players is soon to be replaced with hdmi 1.3, with double the data rate of the previous version. Obviously to use this, both your player and TV need to support hdmi 1.3.

HDCP
And now… The bad news. Since you’re getting a pure, uncompressed copy of the video and audio over HDMI, there’s nothing to stop you capturing that data and making your own copy. That’s where HDCP comes in. Try to play a Blu Ray disk through a TV that doesn’t support HDCP(Through HDMI or DVI-D), you get to see a second of the movie, than a long pause filled with random data, then another second of video. So if you’ve bought a TV with hdmi in preparation for Blu Ray and don’t have HDCP, you’ve probably wasted your money.

Other technologies and advantages
Blu Ray has a more advanced adaptive encryption that won’t be so easily cracked like the CSS used in DVD, digital watermarking, and a mandatory copy system. You register each copy of the disk you make. You probably won’t care about that stuff. What you should care is with the highest standard of copy protection in the industry,much higher than HD DVD, so more companies are willing to let their precious film quality content out on Blu Ray.

JVC have produced a triple later Blu Ray disk with one layer that has standard DVD content that can be read by a normal DVD player. So you go down the video store, they only need to stock one disk, not two. Pop it into a Blu ray player, you get great HD video, pop it into a DVD player, standard definition quality.

There’s also an evil bit which will downgrade all content over non encrypted interfaces (HDCP) to just above DVD quality, the ICT bit. It’s left up to content providers to set this bit on their Blu Ray disks and so far nobody has set it. If it was set I for one wouldn’t have bought a Blu Ray player.

New TV Standards
DVDs played in 480i/480p standard. 720x480 for NTSC video. Blu Ray plays up to 1080p, and 720p, 1080i along the way. 1080p means 1920x1080 pixels of information in progressive scan(non interlaced), at a variety of frame frames from 24 to 60 and even 120. Directors like George Lucas record their movies in this resolution for broadcast in cinemas specially equipped with 1080p projectors, according to Wikipedia. You get a 1080p native screen in your home, you’ve got real home cinema.

Progressive scan is different to interlaced scan, i.e. 1080i. In interlace modes the image switches between odd and even lines between frames to give an impression of movement between frames.

Support

There’s been many new video formats in the past that have flopped, from D-VHS to Betamax. Why should you risk buying a Blu Ray player? Industry support. Blu Ray has most of the PC Industry behind it (Apple, HP, Sony, Dell), most of the movie industry(Sony Pictures, MGM, Lionsgate, Warner, Paramount, Fox, Disney), and most of the Consumer Electronics industry (Pioneer, Sony, Samsung, Panasonic, Phillips, Sharp, LG, Mitsubishi have all announced and shown players).

And the next release of the world’s most popular games console, Playstation, comes with a Blu Ray drive. By March 2007 Sony expects to ship 6 Million Playstation 3 units, all blu ray players.

There is a rival format, HD DVD, the prime backers being Microsoft, Toshiba and Universal Pictures.