Archived: Insiders Thread

[Rio]

Originally Posted by merrick97

Sony sneaks BDP-S500 in before 1.1 goes mandatory

Link:
http://www.engadgethd.com/2007/10/16...oes-mandatory/

If the engadgethd report is correct, why is Sony releasing this player before the 1.1 spec?

Explain to me how it is fair to make a customer pay $700 for a player with a only a 1.0 spec?

Is this article inaccurate? Is this player 1.1 ready? All this does is give ammunition to the HD-DVD camp and make a customer mad who went out and purchased this player thinking it would play all the cool features.

I don't know about Sony's release plan, but like what I mentioned here, I doubt Sony will release new player which is not capable of Profile 1.1.

Here is my conspiracy theory about this

Case 1) They will simply release Profile 1.1 player before Nov.1.
Case 2) They will release Profile 1.0 player which has hardware capable of Profile 1.1, because of delay of software development. They will do firmware update in near future when software development is done.

[MerrickG]

Originally Posted by Maxpower1987

Last I heard Sony missed the testing deadline for 1.1 so weren't able to get their hardware out before November.

I could be mistaken though, memory is pretty foggy about that kind of stuff.

Tell me how this is going to make consumers happy and how this is good for the BDA when they are trying to convince people they are better than HD-DVD?

Again, Im not trying to start problems, but these are things that give people sour experiences and when you have a competitor like HD-DVD these kinds of mistakes become magnified.

[mattym]

it would be bad if the player cant be upgraded, but until it hits the streets we wont know. Samnsung did the right thing by binning the model they couldnt release in time, maybe sony should tke a look at what sammy did if this player turns out to be 'non compliant'

[Uxi]

Originally Posted by dobyblue

Does that apply to the SXRD XBR sets too?

Speaking of which, hopefully Paid... could you check with anyone in the know and say if the XBR5 SXRD is still on it's early January schedule or n ot? I was planning on a 70XBR5 to upgrade from my 60XBR1 which is still running strong... and was sad to see that it was pushed back from fall to early 08. The 70XBR5 and a Black Pearl are on the top of my list for next year.

[paidgeek]

Originally Posted by merrick97

Paidgeek,

I appreciate all that you do on this site, but I have to say that Sony has done something that has disappointed me and I need to call them out. Im hoping you will clear this up.

Anyway this article from engadget says that:

Sony sneaks BDP-S500 in before 1.1 goes mandatory

Link:
http://www.engadgethd.com/2007/10/16...oes-mandatory/

If the engadgethd report is correct, why is Sony releasing this player before the 1.1 spec?

Explain to me how it is fair to make a customer pay $700 for a player with a only a 1.0 spec?

Is this article inaccurate? Is this player 1.1 ready? All this does is give ammunition to the HD-DVD camp and make a customer mad who went out and purchased this player thinking it would play all the cool features.


I respect you like no other and I promise I am not asking this question to be a jerk or confrontational but I really have to wonder why Sony would do this and Im certain you can provide a good answer.

Thanks

The S500 player was never planned to be a "full profile" player. The trouble is it should have been released sooner than the last minute before the grace period expired. It's not that unusual for a player launch to be delayed, but in this case I agree that it gives a bad impression.

[paidgeek]

Originally Posted by Jim

??? anyone ???

This feature is completely possible, but since it was not planned from the beginning, we will have to wait for another suitable title to test the idea..

[Moonraker]

Can anyone comment on all the sony cancellations today?

[paidgeek]

Originally Posted by gand41f

Yes, not only are these movies excellent, their encodes are top-notch as well. This includes titles such as Seven Years in Tibet as well. Are you remastering them for Blu-ray or you are picking ones with recent (and good) masters?

enjoy
gandalf

Sony Pictures is providing Sony Classics with encoding and authoring services. The source of the masters varies depending on the title and the terms of the deal. Sometimes we get a finished master and sometimes we get film elements to transfer.

[paidgeek]

Originally Posted by gand41f

Yay! Paidgeek, can I quote you on this? There are many people wondering about this on this site as well as others. There even is a professional reviewer saying the exact opposite:

http://hdguru.com/?p=131

He claims he has "asked all the 120 Hz LCD vendors". Sony may want to sue this guy for making false claims, he has cost Sony some lost sales (I know it cost them mine, at least until now, as I would never buy a 120Hz TV that doesn't do 5:5 pulldown correctly -- this is the reason why I forewent the Sharp 120Hz LCDs that came out earlier this year even though I'm quite happy with the Sharp 768p LCD that I currently have).

I'm glad Sony fixed the 60i input too. According to this:

http://www.hometheatermag.com/hookmeup/1106hook/

46XBR2 failed the 3:2 film cadence test last year. I don't watch that many movies on TV (have Blu-ray for that ) but it's still nice to have this done correctly.

One more question, can the 40/46/52 XBR4/XBR5 do anything to restore 5:5 in film-based content sent as 1080p/60 (not very important) or 720p/60 (more important, as Fox and ABC broadcast movies this way)? In other words, can it detect repeated frames (AAABBCCCDD) and compensate for them (AAAaaBBbbbCCCccDDddd) (here uppercase are original frames and lowercase are repetitions of identical frames added by the TV) or will it do a 60->120 conversion by repeating each frame (AaAaAaBbBbCcCcCcDdDd) thus resulting in a 6:4 judder? (This is assuming Motion Enhancer is turned off, of course.)

Thanks so much Paidgeek. I (and others) have been searching for an answer to this question for months. I think I'm going to go buy the TV this weekend!

enjoy
gandalf

You are welcome to cross post the information I provided.

I don't know what the display will do with a film originated 60p signal. Someone will have to experiment to confirm.

[tindizzle]

Insiders,

If possible, could you give us some info about recently some released DTHD soundtracks? (min, max, and ABR for both 24bit and 16bit tracks)

And am I correct in assuming that lossless audio is more of a space saving technique than a bandwidth saving technique since you get the peak video rate after subtracting peak audio rate? Thank you.

[phloyd]

Originally Posted by Moonraker

Can anyone comment on all the sony cancellations today?

Sad that Life of Brian is delayed.

The other title is no real loss though

[paidgeek]

Originally Posted by kamiller42

paidgeek:

I have many Blu-rays I enjoy. The encodes are awesome. Nature's Journey is currently the one to beat in my collection.

Anyway, I picked up the AC/DC disc today. I have to ask one question about the video encode. What happened?

I have never seen the DVD version, but my version seems very grainy. The box says it was filmed with 26 cameras. I believe it. I can tell cameras 1-5 have a grainy level of X, 6-10 have grainy level of Y, ... Almost every camera switch has a certain level of grain.

Does the source look like it's a concert filmed in the 60s/70s using a Super 8mm too?

The audio seems fine.

Thanks.

Music based product masters tend to be all over the place. They are shot under the worst of circumstances... available light in darkened environments. Rest assured that we do everything we can (extremely high bit rates) to make sure that you can get everything that was on the master.

Many of the newer HD displays have noise reduction settings, these situations would be a good time to experiment with that.

[paidgeek]

Originally Posted by Dofflan

Paidgeek,

I'm hearing reports that many Sony titles announced are being pushed back. Titles like Life of Brian, I know who killed me, Rent and The legend of zorro. Is this true and why? I thought Sony was aiming for a big Q4 to cripple HD DVD...

Anyways, exceptional work on Spider-Man Trilogy.
Keep up the good work.

I think we were a bit too agressive with our 4th quarter plans and had to scale back. We will make it up to you...

[paidgeek]

Originally Posted by Uxi

Speaking of which, hopefully Paid... could you check with anyone in the know and say if the XBR5 SXRD is still on it's early January schedule or n ot? I was planning on a 70XBR5 to upgrade from my 60XBR1 which is still running strong... and was sad to see that it was pushed back from fall to early 08. The 70XBR5 and a Black Pearl are on the top of my list for next year.

Sorry, I am not looped in to the display sales schedule.

[Mericalis]

Originally Posted by paidgeek

I think we were a bit too agressive with our 4th quarter plans and had to scale back. We will make it up to you...

Thank you for confirming my suspicions. Glad to hear it.

Edit: When I said glad to hear it, I was meaning glad to hear that it will hopefully be made up to us.

[Cruyff14]

Originally Posted by paidgeek

I think we were a bit too agressive with our 4th quarter plans and had to scale back. We will make it up to you...

When will we see some classics? Apart from the upcoming Close Encounters there's nothing I'm interested in coming from Sony.

[Moonraker]

Originally Posted by phloyd

Sad that Life of Brian is delayed.

The other title is no real loss though

20 Million Miles to Earth was the one that I was really looking forward to.

[aygie]

Hey Paid

Can you comment on why Sony removed the in game XMB?

http://www.ps3fanboy.com/2007/10/15/...xmb-seriously/

Thanks

[MerrickG]

I do have to wonder if Sony decided to delay these titles to make room for WB, Fox and Disney on the bluray production lines. If they did it for that reason, Ill call it acceptable.


I dunno, I just get mad seeing this happen, because it provides fuel to the fire of Paramount leaving bluray for "production" reasons.

[richard lichtenfelt]

If interactive features weren't the one point where hd dvd could claim superiority over blu-ray than no one would be talking about it or caring. These goofy ideas of play by play picture in picture commentaries, and during movie games are gimmicky and uninteresting. I don't want to hear and especially see the director as he yammers on and on about every little decision he made during filming. Even the games made by major video game companies based on movies costing tens of millions and years of production time have almost always been dreadful.
The hd dvd version of Transformers lost out on lossless audio so that they could include these interactive features. I don't ever want this to be the case with blu-ray. I would never want the picture or audio to be compromised to make room for extra features.