EX1 Content Delivery, Blu-ray Compatibility Poor!

basspig

basspig

Veteran
I've done my second round of compatibility tests of BD-R discs this week.

The last test was with BD-RE discs. Those results were abysmal.

This week, I tested Sony, Panasonic and Samsung players on display at Sears.

We did better, in that instead of 0% play success, we had 40% of the players read the disc and play it, but still 40% is not good enough to consider Blu-ray as a viable delivery medium for clients in event video applications. It has to be 98% or better (100% now with DVD--I have not had a client complaint about my DVDs since 2003).

The Sears tests were as follows:

Panasonic "cannot read this disc"

Sony "cannot read disc"

Samsung (played disc)

other Samsung (played disc)


My understanding is that the Blu-ray spec *requires* AACS encryption. Players that are fully-compliant will eject discs lacking AACS, which is what seems to be happening here. The Panny deck identified the disc in 7 seconds and ejected it as unplayable. The Sony took 11 seconds to do the same.


In order for the Blu-ray format to really be a success, it needs to provide a level playing field for both Hollywood and indie producers without thousands of dollars to spend on an AACS license.

I was talking with an associate about this the other day and he raised the question of when videographers would start a class action against the Blu-ray consortium. I can see this being a possibility after enough event videographers get burned by the intentional crippling of the majority of BD players, including software players on PCs. The industry says it's just trying to prevent piracy by preventing burned discs from playing on most set top players, but the discs already cost more than a commercially produced BD, so the piracy issue is moot, since it's cheaper to buy the real movie than to copy it to a blank disc costing 2.5X more.

I'm concerned as to how we'll be able to distribute this great EX1 footage in high def, given the hit & miss (mostly miss) nature of Blu-ray. We can't be trying to assist clients with firmware updates, either. And since the Sony playstation 3 update that killed BD-R playback last summer, I don't trust firmware updates for players that DO play BD-R today. An update could render such players useless next month.

So how do we distribute short-run video in HD, other than Blu-ray?
 
When DVD burners first came out, the compatibility issues were caused by a variety of things. Brand of blank disc, brand of burner, software using for authoring, computer platform, etc.... What did you use?

Maybe with a little fact finding we'll find that some works flows are more successful than others. We don't have a Blu-Ray burner....yet. We're planning on buying the LG burner and using both Roxio Toast 9 and Adobe Encore CS3 (CS4 in the future) to author the discs on a Macintosh.

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/taming_the_wild_blu.html
http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/taming_the_wild_blu_2.html
 
Mark, I must have missed something in your initial post, but are you talking about distributing footage on the "rewritable" disks as opposed to the "write-once" format? I'm not surprised that there would be compatibility issues with those, but at such an elevated cost, I'm not sure why I'd use BD-RE apart from a simple test disk useage. I'm really interested in what you're doing as I want to get a burner too.
 
You're absolutely right. The Bluray Disc Forum totally missed the boat on this one.

Initial DVD players were released in 1997-98ish and DVD-R burning was only a pipe dream. But when DVD burning became a reality some of the other players worked with the new format but not surprisingly a lot of the older ones didn't.

The Bluray people should have known better. But just like they missed the boat by initially using MPEG-2 instead of VC-1 for their primary video codec, not requiring support for Dolby TruHD et. al and the whole Profile 2.0 fiasco that is still taking place all the while HD DVD had their spec finished and thought out before the first player was released....now we see BD-R affected.

I anticipate on Bluray deliverables next year however the Bluray camp really need to get their stuff together because too many of their players just do not support and will never support BD-R or BD-RE. And the sad thing is a lot of people may be receiving non-compatible Bluray players during the holidays (and especially the lower cost players, which of course more than likely won't support the writable disc spec).

This is obviously a BIG pain in the butt for content producers and it sickens me that we have to go through this incompatibility process AGAIN!!!!!
 
I never meant to convey that BD-RE is a final release format. I was referring to my first round of tests with a BD-RE disc, because I didn't want to commit anything to a disc costing north of $50 at the time.

I've since authored a BD-R disc with 3 hours of high quality content, for demo/compatibility testing and that's what THIS post is describing the results for.

WRT original DVD-R issues, I sat down with an engineer at CD Recordable Inc, a Bethel, CT-based DVD-R manufacturing plant which is now defunct, in 2002. He explained to me there were two logical issues with DVD-R that some players had trouble with, if not the reflectivity of the media:

Commercial discs have a 2054-byte sector and are DVD-VIDEO
Commercial discs have a different 'preamble' written in the lead-in track

The DVD-R is a 2048-byte sector and is DVD-ROM
The lead-in is written with different data (they have a bunch of PCs and burners that are set up to write this lead in on every freshly-stamped DVD-R).


I have seen cheap media that plays, but breaks up/freezes aftter about halfway through the disc. But there are some players that did not play, such as the Toshiba SD-2109, at all.

Today, it is extremely rare to find a player that will not play DVD-R.


WRT BD-R, it is somewhat rare to find a player that will read these. Less than half is a miserable failure. I am very concerned that there will be a lot of these players in consumer's hands over the coming year and that we will be seeing more demand for the discs and a high return rate because of non-play.

Will WEVA and any other consortium of video producers put some pressure on the BD alliance to ensure a level playing field?
 
I wonder which Sony player it was that you tested. The 300 or the 350? We have the 300 and I'm "hoping" that it will play BD-R's (I doubt it will). Maybe the newer 350 would fair better?

But I agree....it's very sad that the Blu-Ray manufactures seem to be more concerned about being "first to market" as opposed to getting the specs worked out before release.

We still have a Toshiba HD-DVD player and it always seems to work better (faster) than our Sony Blu-Ray player. Sad....
 
basspig,

I have the Sony BDP S-300 and I also use Encore CS3 for my Blu-ray discs and I do not have any issues. I have produced over 50 blu-ray and only one customer told me that it wouldn't play on a Toshiba that they just purchased. They returned it and got a Sony Blu-ray player and it played fine.

Maybe you need the latest firm ware from Sony for your Blu-ray player?
 
These are not my players--they are a sampling of players that my clients might own--they are store demos.

I have a Sony BDP-S301 in my studio, which reads both my BD-RE and BD-R discs just fine. I seem to have the one exceptional player, as the bulk of players tested in stores like Sears, Best Buy, Circuit City, don't play my test discs.
 
Basspig, that stutter or problem at the halfway point in your file MIGHT be the player's inability to handle the layer change gracefully. I see the same thing with my older Sony DVD player. I get a momentary pause in both picture and sound. Very annoying. I'm hoping to get an Oppo BluRay player when they release it.

It's also amazing to me that Sony has to release such a "half-baked" player that can only be made fully functional by doing constant firmware updates. I'm happy that they can continue to add functionality and fix bugs long after we buy the player, but it really does seem like a severe case of "rush it to market".
 
So it looks like it may take another year or two until people have compatible players that will play BluRay files from the cameras accross the board.

Dissapointing to say the least.
 
Oh crap <handslapsforehead>, sorry Bass. Wasn't reading closely enough. I had just been dealing with this problem on my DVD player and had it on my mind. Sorry. I'm very interested in your testing, however, and WILL try to read closer from now on. And now, it's "Back to the shadows again".
 
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