Profile 2.0 is it finished yet?

Nic Rhodes

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Hi

I know we have profile 2.0 discs and players for some time now but at the beginning of the year (feb 08) the BDA was still tinkering with the 2.0 spec and it was estimated that this would have been done and finished this summer. Does anyone know if they actually achieved this?
 
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Was that official, or just rumours from those manufacturers late to the party? Seems odd that Sony would release BD-Live firmware for the PS3, and Cyberlink likewise for their PowerDVD product, long before the specs were actually finished. Also when did the BD50 pop up?

Is it more a case of the authoring tools and implementations were just far from being 100% usable? We saw the same thing really with 'basic' BD-J. It was in players from day one, but took a while to get going while everyone debugged their JVM implementations. Now you can't buy a disc without BD-J it would seem.
 
I think 2.0 is finished, but that's different to saying we won't be getting any more firmware updates.

Unfortunately.

There's another thread running at the moment about BD's progress. Are the players too expensive? Are the discs too expensive? Is regional coding hindering progress?

The last thing we need is people who've actually bought a player to stop buying discs because every 6 months the new big title (Iron Man, TDK, whatever) won't play without a pain-in-the-arse firmware upgrade.

Steve W
 
Have a look at the video of the John Dawson (Arcam president) video (feb 29 2008) on Cinenow.tv

you can find it by searching "Arcam's John Dawson what now after the format war (Sound & Vision - The Bristol Show 2008)"

He specifically says profile 2.0 isn't quite finished yet and they are still re writing bits of 2.0 spec. He expected it to be done in the summer, hence my question. He is quite 'firm' in his statement that they are still working on it.
 
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With BD-Live being so new.. I personally would be surprised if it didn't change. Although these changes may well be deemed 'optional additions' rather than mandatory spec. ;)
 
so is that an optional addition to an option spec then? :devil:
 
I have always thought Profile 2.0 was optional and only Profile 1.1 was mandatory. I have no intention of upgrading to Profile 2.0 as it just seems a waste of time plus I don't intend to connect my player to the net.

Pecker said:
Unfortunately.

There's another thread running at the moment about BD's progress. Are the players too expensive? Are the discs too expensive? Is regional coding hindering progress?

The last thing we need is people who've actually bought a player to stop buying discs because every 6 months the new big title (Iron Man, TDK, whatever) won't play without a pain-in-the-arse firmware upgrade.

I don't think player and discs are expensive considering the format has only been around for a couple of years. It is only the rip off stores such as HMV, Zaavi etc that charge ÂŁ20-ÂŁ25 for a disc make it sound expensive. Even places like Woolworth are selling some discs for ÂŁ23.99. I am picking up new releases for ÂŁ10-ÂŁ12 online. Even DVD wasn't that cheap after 2 years. Also it seems new releases on DVD are approaching ÂŁ15 again while not long ago they were ÂŁ9.99 at many online places.

I actually wished they didn't bother with all the junk like BD Live and BD Java on discs. I just want the best audio and video possible. I am not even bothered about extras anymore. From what I have seen many extras are just the same as the DVD and I haven't watched a extra on DVD for a few years now.
 
Have a look at the video of the John Dawson (Arcam president) video (feb 29 2008) on Cinenow.tv

you can find it by searching "Arcam's John Dawson what now after the format war (Sound & Vision - The Bristol Show 2008)"

He specifically says profile 2.0 isn't quite finished yet and they are still re writing bits of 2.0 spec. He expected it to be done in the summer, hence my question. He is quite 'firm' in his statement that they are still working on it.

How can they be re-writing the 2.0 spec when 2.0 players are already out?

What if a certified 2.0 player is released, then the spec is changed, and for whatever reason it's impossible to upgrade the existing 2.0 player to the new 2.0 (erm...2.1 surely?) spec? That 2.0 player is no longer 2.0 – what is it, 1.999999?

If nothing else it's a full-frontal assault on any logical use of the English language.

Steve W
 
My 'read' of John Dawson statements and also Denon's is more that they didn't have code to use and test that implements BD-Live as reliably as they would want, and hence were using this to help justify why they were not yet producing players, or in Denon's case why they were launching BonusView only machines even though the pricing was high...

About the same time, Sony released BD-Live to the PS3 hoardes and Cyberlink to the PC pirates.

I suspect, and this is my view, that Arcam don't want to, and wouldn't make much money on it, release a player while the firmware is too much of a moving target. Until things settle, Arcam are best off waiting. Unlike Denon I doubt they can release a 1.1 model with a limited shelf life to be replaced by a 2.0 model a bit later on. And after the DV137 and the SACD firmware problems they had there, I doubt players that need constant upgrades are high on their customer service dept's list of things they'd like Arcam to release.

Personally I'm hopeful that when we get an Arcam player, it will be stable from day one, and only need occasional updates as per normal, and be Profile 2.0 so that it has a longer shelf life than 6 months.

It would seem that Denon probably wished in hindsight that they had waited judging by how long it's taken them to release their players outside of the US.

BD Profiles were, and still are, an easy thing to use as scapegoats in my view.
 
My 'read' of John Dawson statements and also Denon's is more that they didn't have code to use and test that implements BD-Live as reliably as they would want, and hence were using this to help justify why they were not yet producing players, or in Denon's case why they were launching BonusView only machines even though the pricing was high...

About the same time, Sony released BD-Live to the PS3 hoardes and Cyberlink to the PC pirates.

I suspect, and this is my view, that Arcam don't want to, and wouldn't make much money on it, release a player while the firmware is too much of a moving target. Until things settle, Arcam are best off waiting. Unlike Denon I doubt they can release a 1.1 model with a limited shelf life to be replaced by a 2.0 model a bit later on. And after the DV137 and the SACD firmware problems they had there, I doubt players that need constant upgrades are high on their customer service dept's list of things they'd like Arcam to release.

Personally I'm hopeful that when we get an Arcam player, it will be stable from day one, and only need occasional updates as per normal, and be Profile 2.0 so that it has a longer shelf life than 6 months.

It would seem that Denon probably wished in hindsight that they had waited judging by how long it's taken them to release their players outside of the US.

BD Profiles were, and still are, an easy thing to use as scapegoats in my view.

I wonder how many people bought a high-end Denon for their PJ-based cinema room, and a cheap 2.0 player (Sammy 1500? PS3?) for their living room.

I doubt that too many people want to access any extras on their projectors, but many of those with a seperate batcave will need 2 players anyway. If you're rich enough to afford the Denon for top quality viewing, the extra ÂŁ165 for the Sammy is probably peanuts, and well worth not waiting 6-12 months for a 2.0 model.

Steve W
 
How can they be re-writing the 2.0 spec when 2.0 players are already out?
HD DVD was 'profile 2.0' from the start and also had a lot of firmware updates some coming out after the format had gone. I'd be suprised if there wasn't going to be a lot more messing about with it.
 
If you're rich enough to afford the Denon for top quality viewing, the extra ÂŁ165 for the Sammy is probably peanuts, and well worth not waiting 6-12 months for a 2.0 model.

Steve W


But the $m question. Do you actually get higher quality of Blu-ray viewing from a Denon or similar ? Take SD DVD performance out of the equation and what is the real difference in PQ perormance ? The Denon 2500 uses the same Panasnic video processing engine as the Panasoic BD30.

Is it because people want to believe they are better due to their cost or just that the unit looks nice or are they actually better in terms of PQ/AQ ?

AVI
 
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To be honest there is actually little difference between a BD-Live title and a BonusView or BD-J disc.

All BD-Live adds that is new, is network access. Everything else is just BD-J code. Nearly all players have chosen to not implement persistent storage as built in, but via SD cards or USB expansion, so whether it's 256MB or 1GB doesn't seem to hold much relevance anymore.

A BD-Live player that is not plugged into the network is likely to behave exactly the same as a BonusView player. Interactive network games with no network still won't work.

The biggest problem with BD-Live and to be fair HDi, is not IMO the player code, it's what sits at the other end. Everyone missed the main point here it seems. Universal HD-DVD's required a different (painful) registration process to other studios. It will be the same with BD-Live...

What I think should have been part of the spec was a creation of a BD-Live common network service such as XBox-Live or PSN so that you had one registration and a consistent online experience. Neither HDi or BD-Live seem to have that as part of the specification.

Now, there is nothing to stop the studios getting together and implementing that and then sharing the BD-J code they use to achieve it, but it would look a lot slicker if there was a central service from day one where you could get trailers etc... Hell, they might even be able to sell you downloads through it... :eek:

As Sonic points out, although HD-DVD was perceived as finished from day one with respect to specificiation, the network part was not delivered until about 6 months or so after launch via a set of firware updates. It was then constantly updated thereafter. Were they still tweaking HDi?

I think it's just posturing and semantics being used to justify the situation. As Nic has pointed out elsewhere, DVD player updates were quite small, a few MB perhaps, your average HD player update can be 50MB or more.

All Arcam/Denon really needed to say was that the situation wasn't stable enough yet for them to be able to come to market. Just doesn't sound quite so newsworthy.
 
How can they be re-writing the 2.0 spec when 2.0 players are already out?

It would explain all the incorrectly authored discs :rolleyes: How can a big hitter like Iron man get incorrectly authored?
 
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Surely Nic much the same way that Universal managed it with some of their HD-DVD's that needed to be recalled?

If the authoring software you use has a bug, then what can you do? More than the players have software that all needs to work properly. I doubt Iron Man will be the last problem disc we'll see. If Iron Man was Paramounts first BD-Live disc, then it may have been the first time they used these features.

What package do Paramount use? Or have they done a Warner who I believe write their own authoring software?
 
Surely Nic much the same way that Universal managed it with some of their HD-DVD's that needed to be recalled?
What HD DVDs refused to play when you put them in the machine because of a failure of the BD Live element? I can't remember any. BD Live is a mess.
 
We are 2.5 years in now, I can accept the bug theory in the first year or so but discs not playing even on a profile 1 player where all discs should play? The authoring software should be faily stable now and the fact a disc doesn't play on perhaps the best selling standalone player atm, well......speechless. There has to be a good reason why these mistakes keep happening.
 
What HD DVDs refused to play when you put them in the machine because of a failure of the BD Live element? I can't remember any. BD Live is a mess.

A mess is a bit strong, I have never had a BD live disc fail on me, so do you want explain what you mean by mess?
 
We are 2.5 years in now, I can accept the bug theory in the first year or so but discs not playing even on a profile 1 player where all discs should play? The authoring software should be faily stable now and the fact a disc doesn't play on perhaps the best selling standalone player atm, well......speechless. There has to be a good reason why these mistakes keep happening.
We don't disagree here Nic... ;)

I think we would be in the same situation regardless of who won the format war, or even if there had never been one. When the MS HD-DVD team used to post you know where, they said they ended up putting workarounds to authoring errors into the software as it was easier than recalling discs. At some point that would have to stop.

The problem or benefit depending on your outlook, is that the HD formats are not just about HD, they introduce almost limitless opportunities for interactive and extras content that we are right at the beginning of the learning curve for. No-one knows where it will lead, and there will be many mistakes along the way.

The best I think we can hope for is that we reach a level of JVM stability for BD-Players that means at the worst, new function will be delivered as BD-J classes going forward as things progress. If some functions (such as a unified content portal) come to fruition, we may see such things pre-loaded on JVM implementations to help speed up loading, but at worst we'll have to sit through loading code from disc...

Once basic JVM stability and decent processor speed is attained then really that's as good as it'll be I think. Discs will be littered with code updates and perhaps downloads too in future.

I'm sure HD-DVD would have been very similar, we just never got beyond first base there really. Perhaps a PC in a box really was the best solution.
 
Is one of the whole points about interactivity and net access in 2.0 is that they can fix a badly authored disc? It should download a patch when the disc fails.......
 
I just can't see how that can work. Even if a player is BD-Live, there's no guarantee that people will have it network connected, so then what? Also given that BD-Live is optional anyway, what about BonusView players? On top of that, how many times would you have to download the update? Everytime you forgot to put the right SD card or USB drive in your player? Also, if it's the large piece of BD-J code that needs updating, how long will it take? If it's worse and it's the video encode you've messed up...

That would only really work at present for platforms like the PC and/or PS3/Xbox where you have a hard disc. A lot of promises were made that just can't be delivered on by the minimum spec mandated for network connections.
 
It would only work for connected players obviously but at the moment no effort is being made on this at all. I just can't see where they are going with all this. I am beginning to think MS were right all along in the java is just too complicated for this big job. This whole thing just doesn't add up atm.
 
Not sure how relevant this is.. :D

But I thought I'd seen complaints from people regarding the new Iron Man BR and it pausing to download the BD-live stuff. Because it had just been released people were waiting a long time to download stuff from the busy servers, that they didn't necessarily want at that time, as they just wanted to watch the movie..

I watched Iron man on the PS3 last night (new disc) and as it started to download the content I settled in for a wait.. However it soon poped-up with a question "download the extra BD-Live content now?" "yes or No"I picked no and it went straight to the movie.. Now I presume this is new.. Is it new to the re-pressed discs? or new to the server (ie it downloads a small bit then asks)??

Great movie BTW :smashin: :rotfl:

:D
 
Is one of the whole points about interactivity and net access in 2.0 is that they can fix a badly authored disc? It should download a patch when the disc fails.......

I just can't see how that can work. Even if a player is BD-Live, there's no guarantee that people will have it network connected, so then what?
The principle works very well for computer games - people who aren't connected end up with a buggy game - so I don't see why this principle can't extend to Blu-ray. As Bald Monkey observes Iron Man has already receoved such treatment.

Nic Rhodes said:
I am beginning to think MS were right all along in the java is just too complicated for this big job. This whole thing just doesn't add up atm.
Indeed. And I will go further - I believe the BDA knew this all along hence the offer at the start to bin the Blu-ray software side for HDi if Toshiba/Microsoft came onboard.
 
Iron Man has not received such treatment. It had a disc recall before street release. The long pause initially was due to Paramounts servers being swamped with everyone who was trying to play their disc accessing the servers. As BM notes, when the servers aren't busy you get a prompt fairly quickly asking if you want the BD-Live content...

This is nothing that new. The Bourne Ultimatum, and other Universal HDi titles would also take 30s or more just to get through to Universal's servers at the other end. You could press cancel, or if you're player wasn't connected things would work much more quickly.

This is just naive authoring by the studios, who are thinking purely of how they can get you to download trailers for new films etc... Not of how it might interfere with the viewing experience rather than enhance it.

It's also got little to do with Java...

As you point out, a model exists for this with games, but that model relies on a much higher base spec, mostly a hard disc that holds the game updates pretty much invisibly to the user and a 1 stop consistent user portal through which these updates are accessed.

Neither format has or had that.
 

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