Help BD-Live features

Discussion in 'Star Trek - The Original & Animated Series' started by The Transformed Man, Jan 17, 2014.

  1. The Transformed Man

    The Transformed Man Commander Red Shirt

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    Got a quick question. There was some great bonus content on the TOS season discs... some was replicated from the old DVD sets, but some were some nice mini docs.

    Well they worked fine enough a couple of years ago. Tried to access them today and all I get is a "The dynamicHD area of this Blu-ray disc is currently not activated." I followed the instructions on the DynamicHD web site... still no dice.

    Did CBS Home Entertainment gimp this feature?


    Yancy
     
  2. SpHeRe31459

    SpHeRe31459 Captain Captain

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    I assume that must mean CBS finally pulled down the servers that held the content.

    BD Live never took off as a feature, so I'm not surprised if it's down.
     
  3. The Transformed Man

    The Transformed Man Commander Red Shirt

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    Oh I understand BD-Live never took off as the BD Group added it as a feature at the last minute to combat what HD-DVD was doing. The early launch of BD was such an enormous cluster and many features which are standard today were considered optional for many 1st Gen Blu-Ray players.

    Yancy
     
  4. Hober Mallow

    Hober Mallow Commodore Commodore

    Out of curiosity, what was it that HD-DVD was doing?
     
  5. The Transformed Man

    The Transformed Man Commander Red Shirt

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    HD-DVD had standards which all players had to meet. All players had to have network capabilities, all players had to be able to play picture in picture for bonus features, all players had to have USB ports. HD-DVD had its own format called HDi which emulated Java script but was incredibly easier to author discs for. Additionally drives had to be capable of updates for increased disc capacities (there were plans to release a 51GB disc) via simple firmware updates.

    Blu-Ray had no real standards... Java was optional and most 1st gen players would not work or would take long times to load for disc encoded with Java menus. Some players had USB ports, others didn't, many players had no network port. The format really was a mess out of the gate. But they ultimately had deeper pockets.

    Yancy
     
  6. SpHeRe31459

    SpHeRe31459 Captain Captain

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    Yep, if you're curious about what a mess Blu-ray used to be, see the Profiles section of the Wikipedia article on it. BD Live is Profile 2.0. These days all players are Profile 2.0 (or 5.0 if 3D is supported) so it's a moot point now. But prior to about 2008-2009 it mattered.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray_Disc#Player_profiles

    Basically as The Transformed Man said they quickly shoehorned in the optional capability to go online for network content. It was entirely optional for a period of time (before eventually becoming mandatory to implement), and, stupidly, it was always optional to include the flash memory necessary to download/cache the online data. All that's required is 1GB of flash memory! think how cheap that is, especially now.

    HD DVD, however, made networking and a flash memory cache to go with it part of the specs from the get go. HD DVD also had dual-decoders (for PiP features) from the get go. Again something that was for a time an optional feature in early Blu-ray players.
     
  7. The Transformed Man

    The Transformed Man Commander Red Shirt

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    It really is amazing that studios bought into that mess, but what they really were buying into was Sony's claims that Blu-Ray had "unbreakable" security and movies could not be ripped. That was all proven false within a week of release of the format.

    I was an early adopter of both formats. Had a beautiful Toshiba HD-DVD player and bought into Blu-Ray with the PS3. HD-DVD was far and away the better format. Basically the BD Group convinced some poor schleps that 50GB discs actually mattered and "bigger was better" when in reality most movies, even completely decompressed, don't take up more than 20GB of disc real estate.

    The proof positive came in the HD-DVD and Blu-ray releases of Batman Begins and Mission Impossible III. Both movies featured PiP commentary, but the way they achieved that was a completely different matter.

    On HD-DVD there was one single encode of the movie, there was a separate encode of the PiP which you could bring up seamlessly by pressing a Pop Up button. One simple encode on a 25GB disc.

    The BD discs were a whole different story. They both came on 50GB discs, and both used the same actual encoding of the movies from their HD-DVD version, just converted into the BD proprietary format. However since there were no standards, and some players could not handle PiP they had to put the movie on the disc twice. Once with just the movie, the second time with the PiP burned into the encode. To make matters worse when you pressed the button to engage the PiP, there was a brief pause in the movie as the player switched branches over to the encode with the PiP. Just brutal, and hardly cutting edge.


    Yancy
     
  8. BillJ

    BillJ The King of Kings Premium Member

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    I have a Profile 1.1 player in my bedroom that I bought in 2009. Still works great.