Blu Ray options

[Stephen Mann]

It’s an exact copy of the 1990’s when writable DVD’s were hitting the market. The current crop of players include some that were manufactured before writable BD media was even on the market. It would be no surprise that many of them won’t play BD media that wasn’t even available when the player was made.

Also, the BD spec itself went through two iterations while manufacturers rushed to grab the “Early Adopters”. The 1.0 spec had no provision to accommodate writable BD media.

In the 90’s I included a card in every DVD that flatly stated that “If your DVD player is more than two-years old, it probably won’t play this DVD.”

Steve Mann

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Dave Haynie]

If you need AnyDVD to play a Blu-ray that you burned on the same PC (that seems to be what you’re saying), that’s total insanity on that PC. All AnyDVD does it remove copy protection, which you can’t apply anyway using Vegas to burn BDs. I have made dozens of BDs, fully authored BDMVs, and never had any problem with them in any player I’ve tried.

PCs aside, the CD manufacturers really did have a ton of warning about BD-R and BD-RE before they went to market. In fact, both formats actually existed, more or less, long before the final Blu-ray spec existed. The same basic disc (different logical layer) is used in Sony’s disc-based XDCAM camcorders. Prototypes of the disc were being shown and discussed with manufacturers as far back as 2000. And they also had a BD-RE recording in a Japanese satellite box, on sales to consumers in 2003, the Sony BDZ-S77 (no pre-recorded disc, no copy protection, no support for AVC or many other media types, but it was a Blu-ray disc). It also used a custom Blu-ray file system, BDFS, rather than UDF 2.5, which was part of the first full standard in 2006.

What you’re probably thinking of is BDAV vs. BDMV support. The original 2002 BD-RE format only defined BDAV, which is a linear A/V file without menus… that’s the format you get if you burn a BD directly from the Vegas timeline. The full Blu-ray 1.0 spec also defined BDMV, which is the Blu-ray with menus, etc. spec. The original BD-R and BD-RE specs didn’t including BDMV… though of course, you can write any format on a BDMV. But it’s certainly possible for a very early player to not have considered that a BDMV structure might be on a BD-R or BD-RE, even though BD-R and BD-RE were well defined before Blu-ray launched in 2006.

It’s not the Blu-ray spec that was missing, but the BD-R and BD-RE specs. You have to go to the third revision of BD-RE or second revision of the BD-R spec to find BDMV use fully documented. These specs were released in September of 2006, three months after the official Blu-ray launch.

This is different than Blu-ray player profiles. There have been several changes/additions to the Blu-ray specs since launch. Profile 1.0, the “Grace Period” profile is what launched in June of 2006… called Grace Period because it had to be phased out. Profile 1.1, “Bonus View” is currently the minimum spec.. this added picture-in-picture support and certain local memory requirements. Profile 2.0 upped the local memory minimums and also required internet connectivity. Profile 3.0 is a standard to enable audio-only players for music-only Blu-rays. Unlike DVD-Audio, Blu-ray audio isn’t a totally different thing… any Blu-ray player can play an audio disc. Profile 5.0 is the “3D” spec, also mandates pretty much everything in 2.0, and as well a double-speed drive.

And they’re still evolving it. The BDXL disc is out.. that’s 100GB or 128GB (BD-RE 4.0 spec, BD-R 3.0 spec), but it doesn’t work in existing drives. Yet. Sony’s got a new encoding scheme that puts 33GB per layer on any Blu-ray, and they claim it’s only a firmware upgrade… great, if you have supported upgrade-able firmware. Which is why I chose a PS3 as my BD player… they’ve already update it to 1.1, 2.0, and 5.0 specs.

-Dave