Alan Smithee

If you're using a Blu-Ray player, check for a setting that will either show it properly with black side bars or stretch it out. If it's an older DVD player, you may have to adjust the TV manually (one reason I held off getting a widescreen TV, until I didn't have to do that.)

hanshotfirst1138

I'm using a Blu-Ray player. Like I said, it's displaying one 4:3 DVD correctly, but not the other, it's very odd.

Spiky

One is probably stored anamorphic and one not. BD players don't seem to pay attention to this ancient DVD problem as much as DVD players did.

You could try having composite or svideo hooked up in addition to HDMI, those might have better options to deal with the problem. If your player has those available.

hanshotfirst1138

Rented a Blu, why is it that when I turn off the player, it always restarts the disc from the beginning, whereas it'll save my place on a DVD?

mythmaker18

It's an inherent flaw in most (if not all) Blu-rays (I think related to Flash or Java, if I remember correctly). This is one slight advantage DVD has over Blu-ray.

Jay G.

Yeah, it's related to BD-J, which is a form of Java used to create menus and such. Basically, the Blu-ray player launches BD-J software on the disc, which then acts as the Blu-ray player software. So the disc software has to have bookmarking or spot saving built into it to work. Anything with a "pop-up" menu is using BD-J.

There's another way to create disc menus called BD-MV, which is much more basic (similar to DVD menus). No pop-up menus, but bookmarking and disc saving is typically possible since all that is controlled directly by the player.

Spiky

I would say it is a matter of too many features. With BD, they put all the control into the disc itself, leaving it out of the player, which is where it makes the most sense. Well, that means every disc needs to have all these features programmed and turned on. Nobody is going to do all that every time. In fact, they mostly don't.

Jay G.

This is debatable. Including all the disc control options in the player in a standard means that those disc control options can never be updated. So first, you have to think up all the possible control options a disc author would want and bake it into the standard, which is impossible. Then, you have to hope that all the player manufacturers properly implement that standard, even for rare use cases, which doesn't happen. I remember when early DVD players had issues when DVDs started using seamless branching, which was part of the DVD standard, but not one some manufacturers had tested against. So if the player has to handle all the playback, and it doesn't for a disc, one has to hope for a firmware update or buy a new player.

Meanwhile, and new features someone thinks up to use for a disc simply can't be implemented; not without updating the standard, risking compatibility issues and requiring all players be updated to the new standard, or creating a new standard and hope it catches on. Nuon tried to update DVD with new features, but the tech never caught on with players.

In contrast, with BD-J, the player simply has to implement a Java virtual machine, and then the disc can use any features the DVD author can dream up and code. BD player manufacturers don't have to worry about updating their firmware for a new feature, as long as their JVM is solid. So BD-J allows for extensibility of the format in a way that was never possible with DVD.

Remember, Blu-ray also has a DVD-like control system built into the player called BD-MV. If studios don't want to use any features outside of what BD-MV can handle, they can stick to just using that.

Java is pretty modular, so an authoring studio really need only implement a bookmarking feature once in order to use it on all titles, since they could port it into each title relatively easily.

And actually, I think bookmarking is pretty consistently implemented on BD-J discs now, it's just not that well documented how it works. Apparently, you press the green "B" button on the Blu-ray player remote to create a bookmark. Then, when starting the disc up again, you can find the bookmark in the scene selection menu of the disc:
http://community.us.playstation.com/.../td-p/21021173

Spiky

And yet, we have more issues with disc-controlled software (BD) than we did with player-controlled (DVD). Taking basic functions like Play, FF, and even bookmarking out of the player's hands was stupid. Honestly, you are arguing against history, not my opinion. Esp the line about waiting for a firmware upgrade for a certain disc...we had almost none of that with DVD, yet it was constant with BD.

All those magical features they promised shouldn't impact these basic features.

Also, "bookmarks" are not always implemented the same way in discs. And not all of them subsist past turning off the player.

hanshotfirst1138

Just out of curiosity, yesterday I was running a PAL disc, and my player was still running it at 1080/60p upscaled. Does it do PAL-NSTC conversion though the HDMI? Should I try running SD DVD at 1080/60 or through the automatic conversion settings at 1080/24? I'll be honest, I don't see much difference.

Jay G.

BD/DVD players typically do PAL-NTSC conversion before outputting the signal, because most US TVs can't handle a PAL/50hz signal. If you TV can handle PAL/50z, there may be a way to set the player to output it instead of converting, but otherwise it's best to leave it as is.

I don't know what you're referring to with an SD DVD at 1080/60. Do you mean this is a PAL DVD? A PAL DVD can't be output as 1080/24.

Dogg

PAL and NTSC don't apply to HD content.

> http://www.videohelp.com/hd

Jay G.

They can apply to DVDs though, and it's not clear what type of "PAL disc" hanshotfirst1138 was referring to.

And while NTSC and PAL technically don't apply to HD, Blu-ray still has to deal with the difference between 1080/60i and 1080/50i content, with the 50hz content typically coming from countries that had PAL, and 60hz content from NTSC countries.

Typically, Blu-ray players that can convert PAL to NTSC can also convert 1080/50i content to 1080/60i, since many US HDTVs can't handle 1080/50i. So "PAL-NSTC conversion" has become a catch-all term for Blu-ray players that can convert 50hz to 60hz, regardless of definition.

hanshotfirst1138

That's what I figured, though given what I paid for the TV, I'd sort of hope it can handle a PAL signal . I assumed that the play and the TV were just converting it, so I was right,.

Well, obviously that CAN'T be the resolution of a DVD, but it's what the TV and player display as the resolution show. I'm assuming it's just scaling it.

I know, but my player has a mode where it does some sort of scaling where that's what it displays as the resolution when I play a DVD (1080/24), and when I put in a PAL disc, it did the same. I didn't think it was possible, that's why I was wondering.

It was an SD R2 DVD. If it'd been a Blu-ray, obvioulsy it would've been different, though I don't think I have ay 50/i 25 PFS movies or TV shows on BD.

Jay G.

1080p/24 output on a DVD typically requires 3:2 pulldown. Some DVD of films recorded at 24fps use repeat flags to provide the repeated fields for 60i; some progressive players can see that and instead of adding in the repeat fields, output it as 24p. Alternately, even if the DVD is encoded as 60i, if the player detects that a lot of the fields are repeats, it may attempt to do 3:2 pulldown on its own.
http://cineform.blogspot.com/2008/12...-hd-using.html


For 50i (PAL) content, typically movies filmed at 24fps are sped up to 25fps, and each frame is split into two fields. It's possible to reverse this; recombine the fields into one frame and slow down the video. I don't know if that's what your player is doing though.

I guess another option would be to drop one frame per second. The video should look quite a bit jerky if that was happening.

Is the info display you see something from the Player, or from the TV? maybe the player is just lying because it doesn't know what to display for 50i material.