After an enforced rush to market Blu-ray players are finally catching up to HD DVD, writes Stephen Dawson.

Until its demise early this year, HD DVD was a more mature consumer technology than Blu-ray.

I am not lamenting HD DVD’s departure from the scene, but it does give us an idea of what to look for in a Blu-ray player. That’s because I can wholeheartedly recommend only one of the Blu-ray players now available in Australia.

This will change, of course. But let us see how we got into this strange situation.

In their consumer incarnations HD DVD and Blu-ray were specified to do similar things.

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Toshiba seemed to have a head start on the Blu-ray consortium.

At first, all Toshiba HD DVD players had the full hardware specification to do what was required.

However, Blu-ray players didn’t – the necessary processing chips weren’t ready.

Of course, the Blu-ray consortium could have beavered away for another year and got Blu-ray up to the same level as HD DVD. But by then HD DVD would have dominated the high-definition video stakes and Blu-ray would have been effectively dead.

So Blu-ray was launched about the same time as HD DVD, but it was somewhat hobbled by lacking a number of planned capabilities.

Don’t get me wrong. It did the most important thing fully: provide high-definition video of unprecedented quality for the consumer. Where it was somewhat limited was with the extra features it supported – or failed to support.

It was planned that Blu-ray would support these features eventually. So the first Blu-ray players to be released were termed ‘grace period’ players.

A grace period is a period in which rules can be broken. Firearms can be surrendered during an amnesty, illegal immigrants can be regularised, and Blu-ray players can omit support for certain features.

There were three things these grace period Blu-ray players were not required to do:
Support picture-in-picture and sound-in-sound;
Offer a substantial amount of ‘persistent storage’;
Provide Internet connectivity.

As far as the first is concerned, the film company Warner Bros decided not to choose between HD DVD and Blu-ray. Instead it released a number of movies in both formats.

One of its earliest releases was 300, based on the graphic novel about Sparta. There were big differences between the two versions.

The most obvious was that the HD DVD version has a ‘blue screen’ feature. This runs the movie with a window in the corner of the screen that shows the original footage before the addition of computer-generated effects and the application of visual processing.

The Blu-ray version doesn’t have this. It’s not clear whether Warner Bros chose to leave it off the Blu-ray version or if the capability was not available then in Blu-ray mastering software.

Regardless, no Blu-ray player available at that time supported picture-in-picture (PIP) capability.

To support PIP, a player has to have the capability of decoding two video streams at the same time. In the case of HD DVD, these players also have sufficient processing power to resize the video windows.

The audio handling is important as well. An audio commentary on a movie simply replaces the normal soundtrack. With HD DVD the PIP capability instead mixes the sound into whichever main soundtrack you have selected.

Blu-ray also had these features specified, but they were absent from grace period players. Instead, a Blu-ray player that complied with the ‘final standard profile’ was required.

These terms suggest that the early players weren’t really complete, so some redefinitions have been under way lately. Final standard profile has been replaced with the term BonusView, as though these features are something extra. BonusView is now the industry’s standard term.

All Blu-ray players released after 31 October 2007 were required to be BonusView players under the Blu-ray licensing conditions. As I write, there are only two BonusView Blu-ray players available in Australia: the Sony Playstation 3 (running firmware 2.10 or later) and the Panasonic DMP-BD30 Blu-ray player.

Due in September is the Denon DVD-2500BT, which is also said to be BonusView capable and should be a good premium unit for higher-end installations.

This is more a Blu-ray ‘digital transport’ rather than a full-blown player, because it lacks analogue outputs. Nonetheless, this will give good results in HDMI-based installations with a high-quality home theatre receiver.

I have acquired only two BDs with PIP. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem uses this in a kind of encyclopaedia special feature in which film clips are inserted into a static background. Jumper has pop-up video clips and other information that can be shown through the course of the movie.

We can expect much more use of this feature now that players are available to support it.

My first DVD player had an useful feature built into the hardware – bookmarks. It could remember the details of 200-odd DVDs and you could insert multiple bookmarks for each. It would ‘remember’ the bookmarks for years.

That requires something called persistent storage. All Toshiba HD DVD players had 128MB of persistent storage; rather more than is required for a few bookmarks.

Potentially this could also be used to retain scores and progress in disc-based games. One actual use was for additional special features.

For example, some HD DVD discs provided web-enabled content, which I discuss below, and this could be retained in the persistent storage rather than having to be downloaded repeatedly.

All Blu-ray players have some persistent storage. Even the grace period players had to have at least 64KB, which is a very small amount. So bookmarks are supported by them all, at least for those Blu-ray discs that include it.

Bookmarks are implemented on Blu-ray by the disc creators writing a computer program in the BD-Java language used by Blu-ray players. Several Blu-ray discs support bookmarks in this way, including Across the Universe, Independence Day and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

BonusView players, though, are required to have at least 256MB. BD-Live players – about which more in a moment – must have at least 1GB of persistent storage. In either case, the storage can be built in (such as with the forthcoming Samsung BD-P1500, or the hard disc of the Sony PS3) or removable (the Panasonic player uses SD cards).

All HD DVD players had an Ethernet port on the back. You could plug them into a home computer network and, if you had a broadband connection, certain discs could access the Internet for addition features.

The Bourne Ultimatum could download trailers for other movies that were retained in the persistent storage of the player unless you deleted them, and it could also compare your results from the interactive game on the disc with those of other players.

Shrek 3 allowed you to download a graphics-rich trivia track that would play like subtitles through the movie.

For the Blu-ray equivalent, you need a BD-Live player. That’s the final stage of Blu-ray evolution.

At the moment there is only one BD-Live player available in Australia, or indeed anywhere in the world. That is the Sony Playstation 3, yet again. It must have firmware 2.20 or later for this capability.

Only one BD supporting Internet connectivity has been released so far – Men in Black. This has trailer downloads for nine movies, a customer survey and a trivia game which can be played online against other competitors. None of this is especially exciting, but it does work and bodes well for the future.

Panasonic is likely to release the DMP-BD50 Blu-ray player before the end of the year and this is BD-Live capable. Sony also has a couple of BD-Live players slated for release in the US during the course of this year, so we may see them as well.

Right now the only choice for a Blu-ray player that supports all the features of the format is the Sony Playstation 3.