Author Archives: Stephen Dawson

New formats always lead to troubles

Posted on February 17, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

When the DVD was first introduced, some of the early discs were released in pan and scan 4:3 format. There was outrage from quite a few enthusiasts, who wanted to see movies in their original aspect ratios, a position with … Continue reading →

Posted in Cinema, Video | Leave a comment

Firmware – it has advantages, and disadvantages

Posted on February 8, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

One of the interesting side effects of digital home entertainment equipment is that products are no longer set in concrete. It used to be that you’d buy some gadget or other and what you purchased you were stuck with. If … Continue reading →

Posted in Equipment, Firmware | Leave a comment

Macro blocking

Posted on February 4, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

In the last item on the HD cricket broadcast I referred to the appearance of MPEG macro blocking in the picture from time to time. So what is macro blocking? I don’t pretend to fully understand the maths behind it, … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, HDTV, Video | Leave a comment

Cricket finally makes it to high definition!

Posted on February 2, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

At long last the first cricket match to be delivered in high definition in Australia was broadcast. This was the 20/20 match between Australia and India, played at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Australia won handsomely. Let us have a brief … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, HDTV | Leave a comment

The first hints of region free Blu-ray?

Posted on January 21, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

When I took receipt today of a review Pioneer BDP-LX70A Blu-ray player, it still had firmware 3.0 installed. This lead to a previously mentioned problem with Die Hard 4.0. I tried to update the firmware over Ethernet using the built … Continue reading →

Posted in Blu-ray, Equipment, Region Coding | Leave a comment

Kerthump!

Posted on January 21, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I’m checking out the audio decoding capabilities of the Pioneer BDP-LX70A Blu-ray player and the Yamaha RX-V1800 home theatre receiver. To help me I have Dolby Laboratories’ Blu-ray demo disc, ‘The Sounds of High Definition’. After I had done my … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Blu-ray | Leave a comment

Dirty Disc and HD DVD error codes

Posted on January 19, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

The other day Paramount sent me the HD DVD of Stardust, all nicely shrink-wrapped. I hadn’t really heard of this movie, so quick lookup on IMDB was encouraging, since it scores 8.1 out of 10 from over 36,000 voters. Last … Continue reading →

Posted in HD DVD | Leave a comment

Confusion on channels

Posted on January 14, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Oh wow, this is confusing. HDMI devices talk to each other, but what are they actually saying? As mentioned in the last item, I’ve been working on a roundup of all HD disc players. One of these is the Panasonic … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Blu-ray, Compression, Equipment, Testing | Leave a comment

How not to review a Blu-ray player

Posted on January 10, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Okay, I’m putting together a roundup of all high definition disc players currently available in Australia. I’ve reviewed most of them, but there are three that I haven’t. One is the Sony BDP-S300, one is the Toshiba HD-E10 and the … Continue reading →

Posted in Blu-ray, Equipment, Rant, Testing | Leave a comment

Insane artistic choices

Posted on January 2, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

So far as I am aware, there is no convenient book that fully describes all the range of issues regarding picture quality that I, for one, need to know. So what I have learnt has resulted from a painful process … Continue reading →

Posted in DTV, Interlacing, Rant | Leave a comment