Is there such a thing as a dvd player without a layer transition pause?
 

I'm in the market for a new player, most likely Region Free. Any recommendations?

I also wanted to know if there are any players that don't have a layer transition pause? This annoys the hell out of me.

The problem isn't the player usually, it's the discs. Some discs don't have a "wraparound" of the data, meaning that the laser has to travel back to the inner rim of the disc at the layer change! Stupid...

Most players I've had are less than one second, which to me is quite acceptable. I've not known any not to jump a little bit. It's the nature of the technology.

Thanks for that info Josh.

But my argument to the manufacturers would be this:
Why can't the players utilize cd-skip technology to avoid this pause? You know what I mean, the laser reads ahead and "caches" the data, then it is played back after that. It only needs to cache a few seconds ahead to avoid that pause. I realize that we're not just talking audio here, there's video too, but surely it's possible for them to do this!
Although I imagine with HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, movies will fit onto the first layer, so this problem would go away, but I don't plan on buying into that format for quite a while.

Basaro it's funny you mention that because I was thinking the same thing as I typed my original response! I would imagine that the size of the data has something to do with it, but I'm not entirely sure.

Many of the high-end players from Denon offer a frame buffer that does exactly what you want and basically eliminates the layer pause.

So it does exist, but you won't find it on the cheaper models.

Although it does depend on the disc my I rarely notice any change at all on my Denon 2900

The high end Denon players have buffers. The 2900 like Brian Shannon has I believe has an 8MB buffer to practically eliminate the pause. Too rich for my wallet now......maybe later.

very cool info, thanks.

I did a little looking and found that the Denon 2200 model also has the 8mb buffer, and it runs for about $600 vs. the $1000 for the better 2900 player.

Now all I have to find is a player that is region free and has a buffer too :)

Maybe I'll check out the international forum.

yep, my 2200 has never even stuttered during a layer change.

Have you tried upgrading this to region free? If I can find the codes to do this, I will definitely get this player. It's discontinued now, so maybe it will appear at close-out prices soon. I gotta get it before it's gone though. ;)

Thanks!

i dont do overseas stuff. i will be selling mine to get the new 3910 though.

Most of the higher end Denon's starting with the 2200 don't have a visible layer change. Also any player using the Mediatech MPEG decoder don't have layer changes. The new Pioneer 578 uses this chip as do a lot of other cheap DVD players out there. If you use our search engine for the DVD benchmark you can get a listing of players using that chip:

database entry

Just look at Mediatech under MPEG decoders.

By the way, that chip also does an excellent job at PAL to NTSC conversion if you can find a way to make any of those players region free.

Do any computer based players eliminate the layer transition? Considering the amount of memory available I suppose it would be trivial.

I don't recall ever seeing a layer transition on my HTPC.

That's what I figured. I tried a pvr-250/sage combo instead of tivo and I'm favorably impressed so I decided to do a dedicated box. Just now putting together a component list. What I see done with ffdshow swayed me too. ;) Very impressive.

FWIW the only players I've ever seen an actual pause on were my old Apex 600 and occasionally on my old CH 500. My Toshiba 3900 has never shown a pause, and recently I've been watching movies on a Sylvania DVD/VCR combo unit and the only thing that occurs during a transition is it shows the subtitles for about 1 second.

Back in the day when Circuit City had their DIVX DVD player firesales I picked up the Proscan model (6960?) and I never saw a layer change pause on it. I've owned much more expensive players since then, but they still have the layer change pause on them.

I don't believe DIVX had a layer to change to, did they?

Not sure about the DIVX layer change, since I would never have tried it, but it played regular DVD's as well and the layer change was never noticeable.

just curious...do higher priced Denon models do a better job of reading disc errors?

I'll second that. Never seen a layer-change on my 2900.