Just purchased the Sony 560D. Hell of a deal with the Sears pricematch ($220). Anyhow, I am thoroughly annoyed at the pause caused during layer changes, noticed during The Gladiator and The Patriot. Sony's FAQ as well as their Customer Service dept. said this was a known issue, but was not considered a bug with their player, just an artifact of certain types of DVDs. Personally I am upset by this response. I would bet that Sony's 7700 and 9000ES players don't exhibit the pause, and I never have seen the pause on a similar Toshiba model.

My question is, is this layer change pause typical of all DVD players? I am considering returning this Sony unit, even though I really like Sony products, and getting another brand with no layer change pause issues. Any comments would be appreciated.

Adam

I think all DVD players have some sort of problem with layer changes depending on the disc.
I have the Panasonic RV30 and I don't see any layer changes for movies such as The Matrix, M:I-2, The Insider, X-Men but I've seen layer changes for Gladiator and Magnolia.

But even so, I don't know how a split second pause can cause someone to be frustrated unless your layer changes are causing very long anormalities in picture and sound.

The pause is approximately 1 second long. True it is short, and causes no real audio or video glitches or loss of data.. However, this really ruins a good scene in a movie, and kind of forces your mind out of the moment and to thinking something like "why can't someone engineer a DVD player which doesn't pause during layer changes..."

It's really a matter of personal preference. For me, this is quite frustrating..

Adam

quote:<HR>Originally posted by adamtraidman:
"why can't someone engineer a DVD player which doesn't pause during layer changes..."

It's really a matter of personal preference. For me, this is quite frustrating..

Adam<HR>

Well, it beats the alternative of having to get up and flip the disc over. I do know what you mean though, I was watching Seven last night and during my layer change there was about a one second pause and a really loud pop from my speakers. It was very distracting. The layer change is normal but some players handle it better than others.



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Go Noles!
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It's not necessarily the DVD players fault. How well layer changes are handled is a combination of the DVD player you have and how the DVD's are authored. All DVD players will have this issue with certain DVD's and exchange the one you have probably will not solve it. Those same DVD's probably have the same or similar effect on other players. One of the problems is where the layer change is put on a DVD. On some it is between scenes and is not noticable, on others it's during a scene and is noticable. My advice would be to keep the player unless there are other problems associated with it.

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MY SHORT BUT SLOWLY EXPANDING DVD LIST


MY GETTING LONGER BUT SLOWLY EXPANDING DVD LIST

"The earth does not belong to people; people belong to the earth. Everything that happens to the earth happens also to the sons and daughters of the earth." -Chief Seattle.

the thing is, you'd think this would be easy to fix. all you'd have to do is add a 10 second memory buffer to the dvd player. basic technology that a lot of cd and minidisk players utilize to avoid skipping when you hit a bump.

quote:<HR>Originally posted by hahn:
the thing is, you'd think this would be easy to fix. all you'd have to do is add a 10 second memory buffer to the dvd player. basic technology that a lot of cd and minidisk players utilize to avoid skipping when you hit a bump. <HR>

Yeh, why don't they just add 256 megs of cheap RAM since it ONLY costs a few hundreds $s more. But I'd rather buy one without it to save the money.

quote:<HR>Originally posted by metrician:
Yeh, why don't they just add 256 megs of cheap RAM since it ONLY costs a few hundreds $s more. But I'd rather buy one without it to save the money.

<HR>

hmm...let's take a look at some basic arithmetic, ok? let's take a movie with very few extras other than the movie itself - saving private ryan DTS version. it's 2 hours and 49 minutes. 169 minutes. the movie itself is under 6 gigs, but let's say it's 6 anyhow. 6000 MB divided by 169 minutes = 35 MB per minute. or .6 MB per second, OR 6 MB per 10 seconds. and this iw with very generous figures too. 128 MB of ram can be bought for less than $70 now. that comes out to roughly 50 cents per MB. again, a very generous figure; you can even get it for less than that. grand total = 3 bucks.

hmm...just a LITTLE bit less than 256 MB (/sarcasm). actually, no it's a LOT less than 256 MB. let's figure things out before we start guessing, eh?

[This message has been edited by hahn (edited December 21, 2000).]

quote:<HR>Originally posted by hahn:
128 MB of ram can be bought for less than $70 now. that comes out to roughly 50 cents per MB. <HR>

I would love to know where you could buy 128MB of RAM for $70. I could always use a little more for that price.

quote:<HR>Originally posted by ZenDog:
I would love to know where you could buy 128MB of RAM for $70. I could always use a little more for that price. <HR>

check on www.techbargains.com
they come out with RAM deals at least once a week. they usually are less than 50 cents per meg...
PC133 ram even.