HomeEven more BD+ nonsense
I just posted a link to this slashdot story in our latest news forum, following up yesterday’s blog about BD+. The effect of BD+ was worse than first though …
Samsung’s BDP-1000 can reportely play the disc, but not without error messages and stutter. Samsung’s BDP-1200 and LG’s BH100 won’t even load the discs. While almost all players will experience increased load time (an additional 2 minute wait on the PS3, for example).
The worse news is that Samsung is not planning on releasing a firmware update to fix this issue for another ‘couple’ of weeks, while LG is quicker off the line with a firmware update being planned for 3 to 4 days. Of course, when manufacturers say they will do something within a timeframe, it will usually take a bit longer.
Artist’s impression of the BD+ logo – nobody knows what the real logo looks like because studios want to hide the fact that discs have them, so you could not avoid them even if you wanted to
If I was a owner of one of these players and a BD+ disc, I would be absolutely incensed. Having paid for a player that is twice as much as HD DVD, for a discs that support less features than HD DVD (unless you count BD+ as a “feature”), and I still have a wait a couple of weeks just so the damn thing will play? No thanks.
Coming after days when Sony BMG’s chief lawyer said that copying a song you already own for yourself (eg. from the CD to your PC, or to your iPod) is considered stealing, I guess this means that even playing the movie you purchased can be considered stealing too. At least you are still able to copy a song to your iPod, even though you will have to live in fear of Sony’s legal department. Maybe this is the whole point of BD+, to make sure nobody can play it so nobody would know whether it’s worth copying or not.
In a related news, Kazuhiro Tsuga, who runs Panasonic’s (Matsushita) home electronics unit said that Blu-ray could defeat HD DVD by the end of the year. If victory means not letting your own customers play movies that they have purchased legally, then I think Blu-ray has already won!
Meanwhile us HD DVD losers will just have to cry ourselves to sleep after we watch Shrek The Third, Transformers, Star Trek: TOS, Battlestar Galactica: Season One, Anchorman, Evan Almighty, Old School, The Bourne Ultimatum and various other HD DVD exclusives to be released before the end of the year. Sniffs.
Update: I’ve read somewhere that the Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer problem is not related to BD+, and it might indeed be a BD-J (Blu-ray Disc Java) update related problem. The Day After Tomorrow disc may suffer from the same incompatibility. If so, then my Blu-ray: Buyer Beware rant last week might be more relevant than my BD+ rant this week. And even if it turns out to be a BD+ problem, then again this goes back to Blu-ray specifications and how they weren’t finalized at the time of release. Imagine what kind of problem people will be having when discs supporting Blu-ray profile 2.0 come out …