Panasonic UB820/UB9000 4K UHD Blu-ray player

[JackTwist]

Originally Posted by dcx4610

I have a weird situation with my 820 where it will automatically power on when I switch on my receiver. No other devices do this. Does anyone have any idea what would cause this or if there are any settings to prevent this?

It’s using CEC to turn on with your receiver. This is by design to allow devices to all turn on or off together. To turn this off with the player, look for the Viera settings and toggle it off. This will make the power setting independent of each other.

[Member-425016]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

I've had that pop up once or twice on the 820 when it starts up. Not using any external memory here either.

Good to know it isn't just my player.

[DJR662]

Originally Posted by JackTwist

It’s using CEC to turn on with your receiver. This is by design to allow devices to all turn on or off together. To turn this off with the player, look for the Viera settings and toggle it off. This will make the power setting independent of each other.

I think it's a handy feature although in a different way.

I use the Vierra setting and whenever I power on my TV (which automatically powers on my receiver also) it does not power on the 820 (which I wouldn't want to). However, when the 820 already has been powered on and I then turn off my TV, the 820 (and my receiver) automatically switches off also which I like. I can also use my TV's remote for certain basic functions of the 820.

[Waboman]

Think there's another Lionsgate/Panny/DV glitch in the system. When watching the new Ghost in the Shell UHD disc on my 9000, there's a strobing effect throughout the movie in DV. Disabling DV and using HDR10 there's no such anomaly. I also played the movie via Vudu in DV. Plays fine. No strobing. Only the Panny and only in DV. Anyone else experience this?

[newtbludger]

Originally Posted by Waboman

Think there's another Lionsgate/Panny/DV glitch in the system. When watching the new Ghost in the Shell UHD disc on my 9000, there's a strobing effect throughout the movie in DV. Disabling DV and using HDR10 there's no such anomaly. I also played the movie via Vudu in DV. Plays fine. No strobing. Only the Panny and only in DV. Anyone else experience this?

yep just tried out the disc for myself and I'm seeing the strobing effect too. Add this to the list of Lionsgate titles that have issues with this player. I am on firmware 1.64 btw

[pbz06]

Originally Posted by Waboman

Think there's another Lionsgate/Panny/DV glitch in the system. When watching the new Ghost in the Shell UHD disc on my 9000, there's a strobing effect throughout the movie in DV. Disabling DV and using HDR10 there's no such anomaly. I also played the movie via Vudu in DV. Plays fine. No strobing. Only the Panny and only in DV. Anyone else experience this?

Yes, I've noticed that too on a couple movies. I've complained about it before thinking it's a TV issue. It seems related to sometimes lighting up my black bars.

But there's a scene in Spectre towards the end when he's walking through the abandoned building, as he enters a hallway the "backlight" (I have OLED so there is no backlight) seems to flicker and strobe for a couple seconds...like the tonemapping gets confused.

Either way, switching DV to "off" resolved it...and it's repeatable.

[RodChester]

Can’t believe we still haven’t gotten the FW update for the players yet. It’s pretty ridiculous how long updates firmwares have been finished but not made available. What is the issue here?

[thebigcheese3k]

I had some flickering with New York Ripper in DV on my 820. Considering these issues have all occurred with recent releases it seems clear this will only get worse. At this time I would not recommend purchasing this player if you are interested in DV playback. If a firmware update does not come soon I will be purchasing another player.

[DJR662]

I did not notice any flickering while watching both New York Ripper and House By The Cemetery in DV on my 820.

Is this flickering issue supposed to be noticable on LCD too?

[Cortiz]

IMO DV is overrated. There is no current TV on the market that can take full advantage of it anyways. For those having issues with some DV discs, i would say just turn it off, engage the optiimizer if you have a Panny and forget about DV. The differences are so subtle that is not worth the headache.

[pbz06]

Originally Posted by Cortiz

IMO DV is overrated. There is no current TV on the market that can take full advantage of it anyways. For those having issues with some DV discs, i would say just turn it off, engage the optiimizer if you have a Panny and forget about DV. The differences are so subtle that is not worth the headache.

I sort of agree with you. I'm still inclined to keep DV enabled due to the specs and potential capability (it also just feels correct ), but like you said I'm not sure TV's today can really take advantage anyway. It seems that most DV movies are just the minimal enhancement layer and not the full stop end to end DV.

When older movies are magically released with Atmos, all they really do is move certain discrete sounds into the height layer but the content isn't object based to begin with....not much different than just upmixing thru your AVR. I'm wondering if most DV is similar in that sense and how different the enhancement layer really is to say using the TV's dynamic tonemapping with HDR10.

I'm struggling to really see a difference when comparing on vs off. Both look equally great to me. I do sometimes just disable DV and use Optimizer with my OLED...never had any issues that way.

[pbz06]

Speaking of Panny (ub9000)...does anyone have the movie Arrival on disc? For some reason this movie struggles to kick into HDR mode and stays in SDR (and looks washed out). Sometimes the initial intro splash screen is OK and so is the top menu of the movie, but once I hit play it reverts to SDR.

I've tried stopping and playing, and rebooting, and sometimes it triggers but usually not. I'm not sure if this is a disc issue or a player issue.

To note, I don't have this issue with any other movie...although it's done it once for Goodfellas, Arrival is repeatable.

[kristoffer]

Originally Posted by pbz06

Speaking of Panny (ub9000)...does anyone have the movie Arrival on disc? For some reason this movie struggles to kick into HDR mode and stays in SDR (and looks washed out). Sometimes the initial intro splash screen is OK and so is the top menu of the movie, but once I hit play it reverts to SDR.

I've tried stopping and playing, and rebooting, and sometimes it triggers but usually not. I'm not sure if this is a disc issue or a player issue.

To note, I don't have this issue with any other movie...although it's done it once for Goodfellas, Arrival is repeatable.

What TV and cable are you using?

[FilmFreakosaurus]

Originally Posted by pbz06

When older movies are magically released with Atmos, all they really do is move certain discrete sounds into the height layer but the content isn't object based to begin with....not much different than just upmixing thru your AVR.

That's not how most properly produced end encoded re-mixed Atmos tracks are created.



A good engineer team will pick apart the original audio stems (separate sound elements that make up the complete soundtrack) and choose which sound effects, music, and dialog will appropriately be tagged as objects in the software mix session (normally the Dolby Atmos Production Suite plug-in within Pro Tools HD) that can be steered/panned around or locked in 3D space (outside of the 9.1 base channel layer positions).



If it's a really old film where there aren't a lot of separate library sounds archived, there is software from Sony that can isolate and pick them out from a combined audio stem. They had to do that with a few Atmos re-mixes like Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Gandhi.



There are other speaker positions in Dolby Atmos besides the overheads (you're thinking of consumer DTS: X here, which is just 7.1.4) that sounds can travel to. You just have to have a more capable Dolby Atmos surround processor and more speakers to experience them. Consumer Atmos has 34.1 potential positions (24 at ear level, 10 overhead, plus the LFE channel).

[tvine2000]

Originally Posted by 88mph

Is the UB820 still a good buy right now? I've been waiting for a price drop and it never came and now I keep thinking a newer model is around the corner.

But the longer I wait the longer I am unable to experience 4K HDR discs. I have a few in my collection already gathering dust.

The price has been the same since the player came out. Last Christmas they knocked a 100.00 off all there models. Maybe they will do it again. I had the 420 ,but i will never understand why they didn't include Dolby Vision, since most TVs have Dolby Vision except Samsung. But the 420 has HDR 10+. the player played 4K discs with no issues. I also don't understand why Panasonic went with analog outputs on the 820.They could have not had them which would make the player cheaper. Also like most players there is a fair amount of plastic.

[J Nada]

Well I just tried Knives Out on 1.66C. It still stutters, so the issue isn't fixed yet...

[wxman2003]

Originally Posted by pbz06

I sort of agree with you. I'm still inclined to keep DV enabled due to the specs and potential capability (it also just feels correct ), but like you said I'm not sure TV's today can really take advantage anyway. It seems that most DV movies are just the minimal enhancement layer and not the full stop end to end DV.

When older movies are magically released with Atmos, all they really do is move certain discrete sounds into the height layer but the content isn't object based to begin with....not much different than just upmixing thru your AVR. I'm wondering if most DV is similar in that sense and how different the enhancement layer really is to say using the TV's dynamic tonemapping with HDR10.

I'm struggling to really see a difference when comparing on vs off. Both look equally great to me. I do sometimes just disable DV and use Optimizer with my OLED...never had any issues that way.

Maybe there isn't as much of a difference with the newer OLEDs, but with my E6, DV still looks better than the same movie forced to play as HDR10 on the 9000 even with Optimizer on. I can see the difference with colors. There is added punch that the base layer HDR10 can not produce. So in my case DV is always on for DV movies.

[Geoff D]

DV is not some magic piece of tech that does all these things that HDR10 can't. I'll say it again: they both use the exact same transfer function (PQ a.k.a. ST.2084) which renders out a 10,000-nit container in BT.2020 colour space. Exact. Same. EOTF. Dolby is 12-bit at source while HDR10 is obviously not, but this notion that viewing 12-bit DV on a 12-bit display will be some amazingly transformative experience vs what we have now is totally wide of the mark.

I mean, I actually agree that we're still not seeing HDR at its fullest on most TVs because they don't do the full amount of range, colour volume, or both, but that's got very little to do with bit depth per se and everything to do with the great contrast but restricted luminance of OLED and the bright luminance but poorer contrast of LCD. Let's get TVs that can actually do 4000 nits peak and 100% volume of P3 with 1,000,000:1 contrast and then you'll see HDR at its best, if they're 12-bit then so much the better but even if they're not then as long as the processing is being oversampled (Sony's internals run at 14-bit on their higher end sets) then we're not going to be missing out on much.

Technically there's no such thing as "Dolby Vision grading" at source because you don't grade in "Dolby" or "HDR10", you grade in the PQ EOTF at whatever bit depth (usually 12-bit minimum if dealing with a new 16-bit scan or RAW files) using whatever pro grading suite you'd like and all the usual grading tools therein (Baselight, Mistika, Resolve etc). If you want a 'Dolby Vision' pass then you load the finished grade into the Dolby suite and run the automated analysis software, this generates a metadata pass for whatever downgraded version you'd prefer (usually starting at 100-nit SDR 709).

You then watch the 'downgraded' version using this dynamic metadata to output the SDR transform on the fly to a separate SDR client monitor, and using the Dolby trim controls (up to 21 different knobs to twizzle in the latest profile) you adjust the downgraded image to best represent your creative decisions in that space, this adjusts the metadata accordingly. Once that's done then that's your 'Dolby Vision' pass completed, so despite all the marketing double-speak and half-truths this entire system is basically not much more than adding dynamic metadata to an extant HDR grade.

To that end, if you've got a TV that's already got excellent tone mapping, or has enough range that it can afford to show the EOTF 'as is' and just clip past a certain point, then you're already breezing past one of DV's main benefits. My TV does the latter, it can go out to about 1500 nits of brightness before it clips and about 1000 nits of colour, so essentially I'm seeing 75% (1000 nits) of the PQ curve in "1:1" quality with no mapping needed, with diminishing returns after that. So on pretty much every UHD disc that Universal, Paramount, Disnee and Fox have made I have no need for dynamic tone mapping at all, it's the gear from Warners and Sony that's mastered out to well beyond 1000 nits (even for average brightness, which is insane) where I need some manual intervention, be it the Panasonic HDR Optimiser or the dynamic powah of Dobly.

So yes, despite my withering assessment of DV I do still default to it wherever possible just to make sure that the mapping is being taken care of on the more 'extreme' HDR grades, and I can't be bothered to keep turning it on and off so I just leave it on for stuff mastered to 1000 nits anyway. But more than all of that I continue to use DV because of the entirely unexpected benefits, like the ability of a FEL encode to actually correct for poor compression in the base layer and to generally provide cleaner gradations of colour than the HDR10 encode, even though the display is still 'only' 10-bit (which is the neat thing about oversampling). Not that HDR10 grades are all posterised pieces of shit, no no no, but DV just has the defter touch....which circles back around to my point at the top about 12-bit display not being some game changer for Dobly: it'll be a further refinement, not a revolution. The real HDR revolution will be in the TV tech on a general level.

[Waboman]

Great post, GD. I've already tipped my hat to you. This time I'm raising a pint. Cheers.

[Waboman]

Originally Posted by J Nada

Well I just tried Knives Out on 1.66C. It still stutters, so the issue isn't fixed yet...

Lol. Really? So what did 1.66 even address/fix?