Blu-ray is simply getting better and better in both the features the discs offer and the performance of the players.

It is now three years since Blu-ray hit the Australian market in the form of a $1,600 player from Samsung, and a $2,700 one from Panasonic. When I set out to review those players, I spent ages on the telephone with various movie companies just begging for a disc or two to use for the review because none were available in the shops.

A great deal has changed since then. For one thing, if the quantity of titles is anything to judge by, the format is well and truly here. If you search on ‘Blu-ray’ on a popular Australian DVD retail website, you get over 1,200 results. I have over 400 in my own personal collection.

Of course, that’s nothing on the many tens of thousands of DVDs available, but it does show that the format is here to stay.

And it isn’t just the latest blockbusters or the major studios releasing Blu-ray discs. Of course, all of them are on board (now, after some were seduced away by HD DVD for a while). But smaller Australian distributors, such a Madman Entertainment, and Icon Film Distribution are pushing them out too. The former does a brisk trade in Japanese Anime, while the latter most carries small independent pictures, yet has dozens of Blu-ray versions available.

As for the players, there are a dozen to choose from, most well under a thousand dollars and some only two or three hundred.

Furthermore, all those early players could do was, well, play the discs. They were what was known in the lingo of the time ‘Grace Period’ players. That is, they were players that had been released without all the ‘Final Standard Profile’ features that were intended for Blu-ray.

Why? Because had the powers that be waited until the hardware was sufficiently developed for those Final Standard Profile players, the rival HD DVD would have come to dominate the market. Blu-ray would likely have been the one to lose in the high definition format war.

As it happened, aside from the Playstation 3, it wasn’t until early 2008 that a Final Standard Profile player became available. This offered the ability to have picture-in-picture and mixed audio functions, known as BonusView.

But that in itself turned out to be an interim step. Because also planned from the start was something called ‘BD-Live’, which was primarily an ability for a player to communicate with the Internet under the command of BD-Live enabled Blu-ray discs. Within six more months, these players also had started to appear.

This was intended to be for premium Blu-ray players, with Final Standard Profile the norm. Instead, Final Standard Profile Blu-ray players have effectively disappeared, because it seems that just about every Blu-ray player being released is BD-Live capable. Perhaps we will see a return to non-BD-Live players in budget versions in the future, but for now if you buy a new Blu-ray player, you get everything.

The State of the Art
For some time there were also wobbles on the audio side of things. Blu-ray offered new high resolution audio formats – Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio – but few players could decode the latter. Now, though, all the current models from Pioneer, Panasonic, LG, Samsung, Sony, Yamaha and Oppo can decode these, ensuring the best possible sound even for those without the latest home theatre receivers.

All players also have the ability to pipe the audio out in ‘bitstream’ format via a HDMI connection. That is, if the home theatre receiver itself has DTS-HD Master Audio or Dolby TrueHD decoding capabilities, then it can do the decoding. From a quality point of view, there is generally little difference between the two options, but those who spend big on high end electronics may prefer to use their receiver for this job.

All Blu-ray players are now fully 1080p24 capable. That is, for movie format Blu-ray discs, they can deliver the video at a frame rate of 24 frames per second (or, more precisely, 23.976 for technical reasons). This was an advance of vital importance over the early models because only at this rate can the picture deliver smooth motion. Converted to the 60 frames per second (actually, 59.94) produced by the early players, camera pans and the like appeared remarkably jerky, all the more visible thanks to the sharp picture produced by Blu-ray.

The most recent Blu-ray advances have been mostly to do with convenience. One is to do with Blu-ray live. This requires an Internet connection to operate, which can be inconvenient in many domestic situations. Some models have been emerging lately which feature built-in WiFi, while others support WiFi dongles plugged into their USB ports.

For proper operation, BonusView and BD-Live enabled Blu-ray discs need the player to have ‘persistent storage’, one gigabyte or more in the latter case. Most players provide either a USB port or a slot for an SD card for this purpose, but an increasing number of premium models also have one gigabyte of memory built in which can be used instead.

Faster, faster
The main enhancement to user convenience has been speed. When they first appeared, both Blu-ray and HD DVD players were appalling slow. I still have an original model HD DVD player (the top of the line Toshiba HD-EX1) which takes a good three quarters of a minute just to open its drawer from standby mode. Those early Blu-ray players were no better. And, indeed, some were even slower to start playing a disc. A couple of models took a minute and half to get the disc Speed playing, thanks to some BD-Java programming that has to be loaded in from the disc at the start.

These days the speed range is enormous. Some brands are very speedy: LG, Samsung and Oppo. These get their drawers open in three to five seconds, and start Speed in 20 to 25 seconds. At the other end of the scale, Panasonic and Pioneer players remain slow. They take twenty to thirty seconds to open their drawers, and nearly a minute to get Speed working.

But new models are coming out all the time, and you never know what will the next performance issue to the be addressed in each new model.

Speaking of new models, developing a Blu-ray player is an expensive proposition, so some brands are basing their own models upon platforms purchased from the other brands. Several use the Sharp platform, and a couple use LG’s. It is worth playing attention to these because in some cases there is little or no performance difference in a player that costs several times the price of the model upon which it is based. The most notorious example of this was the BD-30 Blu-ray player from the famed audiophile brand Lexicon, which was found to contain within its case the Oppo BDP-83 player, seemingly unaltered aside from splash screens and logos, but costing seven times as much.

Staying Up To Date

Blu-ray players are not like CD players, nor any other of the older consumer electronics devices. They are more like computers. Indeed, the official programming language for Blu-ray is BD-Java. This allows disc developers to do incredibly creative things with new Blu-ray discs, but it also means that these new discs may turn out to be incompatible with some Blu-ray players.

Consequently, all major Blu-ray player brands offer firmware upgrades once or twice a year for their existing (and former model) players. The firmware is the control programming for the player.

In some cases, upgrading the player is a matter of using a computer to download the new firmware from a website to a USB drive, plugging that into the player and running the player’s upgrade option. Most of the major players, though, now offer automatic firmware status checking and upgrading. That is, if they are plugged into a computer network then whenever they are switched on they will check their home websites to see if there is a new firmware version, and inform you if there is. You then have the option of allowing the player to upgrade itself, or not bothering.

And sometimes the firmware is more than just fixes for difficult discs. When I was using the current model Samsung BD-P1600, it acted just as I described. I permitted it to upgrade itself, and fifteen minutes later it had whole new capabilities, including the ability to play YouTube videos from the Internet.

So Blu-ray is not an entirely stable platform, but it is an increasingly exciting one that now adds a decent amount of user convenience to its already undoubted virtues of the best available picture and audio quality.