orangerunner

I was wondering if the technology involved in standard Blu-ray discs has levelled-off to a point where no more firmware upgrades will be required.

How long are the manufacturers required to continue to supply firmware upgrades for older players?

If the technology continues to evolve and require new firmware, will we find that older players will be rendered obsolete and unsupported?

That's the nice thing about DVD is that you can take a pressed DVD produced in 2016 and it will still play in a DVD player built in 1998 without the need for firmware upgrades.

morriscroy

Good questions.

From an historical perspective, have there been any "abandoned" bluray players from the 2006-2008 early bluray era, which never received any further firmware upgrades and cannot play current 2015-2016 bluray discs?

Alan Smithee

My Oppo BDP-93 hasn't been updated in a couple years now and I haven't had any problems with new titles on it. There's only one problematic title I have on that player (Storm Surfers, which I reviewed here) which has a glitch at the beginning but at least still plays. Oddly it froze up at the layer change on one of the recent Carol Burnett DVDs which I'm trying to get them to fix (the disc played fine on my other players.)

PhantomStranger

Yes, a few very early Blu-ray player models will choke on the increased BD-Java of newer releases that demand higher computing resources. It's the lack of on-board memory in those models that was cutting Blu-ray's minimum specs very closely in the first place.

If people were wondering, 1080P video quality has objectively improved since the format's launch. The studios are squeezing higher fidelity and transparency from studio masters to 1080P video than ever before. It's clear now that production facilities didn't have a complete grasp of Blu-ray technology in its early days. The improvement has been relatively greater than what was seen for DVD over its lifespan.

jjcool

And despite all these technological advancements, most of the time players still can't pick up where you left off on a disc.

Barth

This. Its almost crazy there has been a step back in the quality of Blu-ray players. My main player I bought in 2010 is the best of the two I have bought since then. It doesn't have the wireless apps, but dang if it doesn't upscale and play regular and blu dvds without a hitch.

The new one I bought last year...it pauses and freezes, gives me messages something about this or that and kills the audio 30 minutes in since I'm not using a legit dvd, even though its from redbox. I'm about to throw it in the trash.

jjcool

My two players are still the same ones that I bought at Costco 4 or 5 years ago for $90, and they came with an HDMI cable. They still work perfectly and have yet to choke on any disc I have thrown at them, except for discs with obvious visible damage. When I have to replace them, I know I will struggle to find ones that are going to be comparable, and relatively inexpensive.

Alan Smithee

My Oppo player auto-resumes on discs that don't use Java. On discs that do use it, some have a resume function programmed in (where it asks you if you want to start from where you left off) but some don't.

Spiky

Most of the problems are disc-related, not player-related. Of course, that becomes a player problem.

Not allowing resume is a disc authoring issue. They made the BD system way too controlled by the A hole studios and they do stupid crap. The most annoying is, of course, the difficult-to-circumvent trailers and govt warnings.

Recent problem I've seen (Oppo 93) is audio dropouts due to overzealous copy-protection-blocking attempts combined with HD audio. They put so many "seamless" branching levels into these discs that the old players can't keep up with the larger audio work plus branching, and it loses audio for a second randomly. I forget if it's hardware or software, many discussions at AVS and elsewhere. Probably hardware, just not fast enough.

PhantomStranger

The studios had fantasies of elaborate programs running during the movie like chat and trivia, which forced them to abandon a universal resume function on Blu-ray. In retrospect it was clearly a disastrous choice.

You have to remember that most of the functions for Blu-ray were designed well over ten years ago. Hollywood thought movies would become more like games as Millennials grew up.

Josh-da-man

Yeah, they were pushing shit like BD-Live like crazy, and it was a total fucking waste. I remember that one season of Fringe had a commentary that was exclusive to BD-Live, where you had to register an account with Warners to hear it, and then you actually had to stream the whole fucking episode and waste bandwidth for something that should have been on the fucking disc in the first place.

Alan Smithee

BD-Live has been implemented so poorly that I just have to laugh at it. I still keep it activated and check it out sometimes out of morbid curiosity. Fox and Universal discs let you go to their "BD-Live Portal" but the damn things haven't been updated in years- they have movies listed as "coming to theaters" that are in the bargain bins now. The stuff like "record your own commentary" looked interesting, but they discontinued that before I even got any discs that featured it (now when you try to select them they say "We're sorry! This feature has been discontinued for this title! Have a nice day!") Sony, the company that INVENTED the damn format, now just has a screen telling you to go to their website when you try to access any of their BD-Live content now. At least they didn't put the actual MOVIES online where they could be deleted...

PhantomStranger

The BD-Live stuff was unofficially abandoned by studios around 2009-2010.

Alan Smithee

Hardly enough time to even try to perfect it. Universal discs still play trailers via BD-Live when you start them up, a few of them even update the trailers too! But I'd rather see those after the movie rather than before, usually when I put a disc in I want the movie to start right away.