I just brought a brand new Sony BDP-S2000ES and it's the ****ing best

[ZoetMB]

Originally Posted by chip75

I often wonder what happened to all the DVD player features that we've lost on Blu-ray. What happened to front-panel displays, chapter and title readouts (not every player has them) and most of all the jog-dials on remotes? People don't scan through discs anymore?

Same thing happened for CD audio, especially since most CD players are now DVD or DVD/BD players. So many of the advanced controls have disappeared and I miss some of them.

The original CD Redbook specification called for index markers in addition to chapter (track) markers. It was designed that way so that different movements of a symphony could be in the same track, but you could still navigate to a movement. My first player, a Sony, had that and so did a Panasonic Technics I had after that. But the record industry never bothered with it - they just put each movement in a different track. So the player manufacturers dropped the function.

My Technics had a feature where you could pre-program the tracks. So instead of listening to the tracks in order, you could press 17, 12, 1, 4, 5 and listen to those five tracks in that order. The Technics also had a cue mode where you put the player in pause and then advance to the track you wanted to play. When you clicked the play button, the track started playing instantly. This was useful in the days before CD-R when I would make mixed tapes to cassette for the car of if you used your CD player in a disco or for radio.

In addition, CD actually always had the ability to display track and artist names by storing such metadata in the P and Q codes (I think that's what they were called). But the record labels didn't support it, so the player manufacturers didn't bother with it.

But in the end, most people just want to put on a CD and listen and most DVD/BD users just want to put the movie on and watch it (and possibly easily navigate to the special features). They never used the other functions, so there was no point including them, especially since the market has forced player prices down so much. Remember that the first BD players cost $1000 or more. Now you can buy a decent player for $70. And that doesn't even consider inflation.