‘Heroes’: To BD-Live or Not To BD-Live

Posted on October 11, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Reader James has been very kind to me. First he found and sent down some VHS tapes for me to use in a comparison (still coming). Now he has sent down Seasons 1 and 2 of ‘Heroes‘ on Blu-ray. Now that’s what I can generous!

And useful, since the Australian arm of Universal didn’t bother to provide its PR company review copies of the Blu-ray releases.

So now that I’m in a position to do some comparisons, especially between the Blu-ray and HD DVD versions of Season 1. Here are the differences:

  • Five discs rather than seven, thanks to the greater capacity of Blu-ray. The encodes seem to be the same VC-1, so any differences in picture quality will be solely due to the quality of the Blu-ray player versus the HD DVD player.
  • The sound is in Dolby TrueHD rather than Dolby Digital Plus. Still 5.1. Differences are likely to be minimal since the original sound track doesn’t really stretch the medium.
  • Spanish has been added as a subtitle to the HD DVD’s English and French.
  • the ‘Helix Revealed’ feature, part of the U-Control embedded special extras of the HD DVD has been omitted, although the other parts of this remain, including the PIP commentaries on quite a few of the episodes. These are implemented as BonusView PIP features.
  • All the deleted scenes and featurettes are present, including the original 71-ish minute pilot episode (it’s listed as 73 minutes on the HD DVD). There are two marked omissions though: the ‘Mind Reader Game’ from the HD DVD, and the ‘Genetics Abilities Test’, from which you were supposed to be able to upload your results to a ‘Heroes’ website.

Two different review sites suggest that this is a BD-Live (ie. Web-enabled) title. One says:

BD-Live ‘ready’ on Disc 1. This means that when Universal launches their BD-Live service later this year you will be able to access the content from online such as downloadable content, additional deleted scenes, commentary, or etc.

The other merely states this as a fact.

But the Australia Blu-ray of Season 1 mentions no such thing on the box (unlike Season 2, which does). And the Australian version seems to be shared with Europe, and seems to be identical to the US version, since it has an FBI copyright warning.

Finally, there was no hint on any of the menus of any the discs of the existence of some BD-Live functionality.

I was happy to let matters rest there, thinking that perhaps those two sites had made an error. But then I examined the Season 2 Blu-ray discs, and I could find no indication on Disc 1 of the BD-Live content which is claimed to be there. But the back of Season 2’s box clearly states:

Access the BD-Live Centre online and download even more bonus content: the newest trailers, on-set interviews, exclusive events and much more!

The episode guide on the back of the slick says that this is on Disc One. But I can’t find any reference to it in any of the menus on that disc.

So now I’m totally confused about whether there is indeed BD-Live content for Season One, and how you get at BD-Live content for Season Two. I shall have to find out on Monday.

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Iron Man succeeds

Posted on October 10, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Well, that explains things. A couple of posts ago I mentioned that US watchers of Iron Man on Blu-ray were having their Playstation 3s seize up on loading the disc. No wonder. It seems that the Blu-ray version of this disc sold 260,000 copies on the very first day (and half a million in the first week). Presumably the Internet site to which it linked was initially overloaded.

The report also mentions that compared to the 500,000 Blu-ray discs of this movie sold in the first week, 7.2 million DVDs were sold. That’s an impressive result … for Blu-ray. Some seven per cent of sales were Blu-ray. Okay, that proportion is probably biased since enthusiasts probably also tend to be early adopters of technology. Nonetheless, it does give cause for hope that Blu-ray is succeeding, and will be a format here to stay.

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Piracy

Posted on October 3, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

The other day one of my daughters announced that she had borrowed from a friend the entire ten season series of ‘Friends‘ on DVD. When she showed me the box, a slim, professional looking, cardboard affair containing only five DVDs, I was perplexed. We spent a few minutes working things out, and it appeared that there must be two full seasons per DVD, with some 24 episodes per season, each of about 22 minutes. That works out to well over a thousand minutes of video per disc.

The next day I happened to notice that the complete ten season series of ‘Friends’ was available on DVD on a 40 disc set. Somehow that (six episodes per disc) seems more realistic.

So I examined one of the five discs from this packet. It is a DVD-9 dual layer and is quite chock-a-block with the entire surface area utilised. A few calculations showed that the bitrate for each episode ranged between about 0.8 and 1.1Mbps (of which nearly 0.2Mbps was used in audio). Compare that to the 3.5 to 4Mbps of a regular low quality DVD, and the 6 to 8Mbps of a high quality one.

Further examination revealed that the resolution was, instead of the 720 by 576 pixels we use in Australia, or the 720 by 480 pixels they use in America, a mere 352 by 240 pixels (the DVD player scales this up). Which explained two things: why the picture was so soft, and why the compression artefacts, while bad, were not as bad as I had expected.

I’m going to assume that this is a pirated set, and it confirms to me that copyright pirates simply don’t care about quality.

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Has Iron Man recovered?

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

This morning I checked ‘The Iron Man Blu-ray Ferro-Thread‘ and found that overnight the problems seem to have disappeared and people were getting onto BD-Live fine with the Iron Man Blu-ray. As compared to my discussion in the post before last.

So I loaded the disc into the standalone Sony BDP-S550 player to see if it would work for me. First I made sure that there was no BD data stored for this disc from my previous fiddlings around. Instead of going straight to the Paramount welcoming screen and then language selection, the disc showed the blue Iron Man icon for a few seconds, and then displayed the following message:

Additional bonus features are now available via BD-Live for this disc. Note this one-time process may take several minutes depending on your player model and Internet connection speed. Would you like to download these features now? No|Yes

The text was white, in a rather crowded font. It was presented in a dark blue box, outlined by two white lines. What I’m trying to get at here is that this was some kind of graphic presentation — albeit a simple one — rather than some raw message text.

This, clearly, was a change. I hadn’t seen this message mentioned on any of the Internet boards I had been checking yesterday, nor have I yet this morning. Could it be that Paramount has added a little front-end query to help deal with traffic problems and customer complaints?

Anyway, it still needs a little work. When this message came up, the ‘No’ was in pale blue and the ‘Yes’ in amber. Flicking the arrows on the remote switched the colours, but it was not at all clear which was the selection colour. I took a punt with ‘Yes’ in pale blue, the disc loaded the same way it had yesterday and would not give me access to the BD-Live features.

So I ejected the disc, deleted the ‘Iron Man Disc 1’ BD data that had been stored on my persistent storage, and restarted it. This time I left ‘Yes’ in amber, and the blue logo appeared, pulsating gently for a minute or two (my stopwatch is still broken) until a new message appeared:

DISC UPDATE COMPLETE! Press continue to proceed. Continue

That’s where I am right now. So let’s press ‘Continue’. Blank screen for five seconds, then Paramount opening page and now language selection. I pick English. Various disclaimers of the kind Paramount normally place at this point on their discs. The blue icon reappears as it has previously, is there for five seconds and now the main menu is up. I arrow around to Extras and then to BD-Live. (The menu selection indicator is amber letter colouring here as well. This is made clear by only one out of the four selections being so highlighted. That doesn’t work when there are only two selections.)

I select BD Live. Blank screen for a second, then the blue logo for a few seconds, and then the BD-Live page, which has only one feature at the moment: to test my ‘Iron Man I.Q.’ with an in-the-movie trivia game. There’s a ‘Download’ selection, and also a ‘User Login’ button. Thought I might as well try the latter. Blue logo. Logon screen. This didn’t go well. After filling in the boxes there was a message ‘An Unexpected Error has Occurred, Try Again Later’. Oh well.

So I hit the Download button instead. There was a progress bar for this, but since the whole download took less than two seconds it wasn’t really required. There was an option to ‘View’ after this, or ‘Delete’. I chose ‘View’. Blank screen for five seconds. Blue logo is now up, pulsating gently. Less than twenty seconds has passed and a menu pops up. Accompanying explanatory text says:

Iron Man I.Q. lets you test your Iron Man knowledge by playing unique trivia games over clips from the movie.Start with one of the featured quizzes created by Marvel Entertainment and check back soon for an expanded version that will let you create and post your own I.Q. challenges over the movie.

Well, that’s it for the moment. Paramount seems to have done some quick and smart work to overcome most of the teething problems. Their BD-Live features are obviously expandable. It worked at tolerable speeds on a standalone player, and presumably quite a bit faster on a PS3. It was enormously faster than the BD-Live features on Sony Pictures Entertainment titles.

Pretty impressive, really. I’ll come back in a few days and check the ‘Login’ feature. I’m not really sure what it’s for. Is it to log into some kind of BD-Live portal, which is company independent (if so, I’ve already done this with the Sony discs). Or is it for Paramount stuff alone?

All that, though, is for another day.

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Will BD-Live ever be any good?

Posted on October 1, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Eventually, I reckon.

While I was writing the previous post a possible answer to a conundrum occurred to me.

Consumer technology is not built upon an assumption of endless consumer patience. If you provide some feature in your equipment, consumers will expect to be able to press a key on the remote control and have it happen rapidly.

So how do I explain the BD-Live performance — extraordinarily slow performance — on the first dedicated consumer BD-Live Blu-ray player I’ve checked? To get this in perspective, let me loosely outline what happens (loosely, because my beloved stopwatch passed away last night and has yet to be replaced). You place a recent Sony Pictures Entertainment disc in the player and it loads, pausing for the better part of a minute on the BD-Java loading logo. Once that’s done everything proceeds normally until you choose BD-Live from the Special Extras menus, whereupon nothing happens — other than the player becoming completely unresponsive — for I estimate some two minutes. Then the screen goes black, and after another lengthy pause, a ‘progress bar’ appears. This is a four segment bar, and since each segment seems to take half a minute or so, it isn’t very informative.

I blame the Sony PS3. These companies aren’t dumb. When planning to release BD-Live discs they would surely have tested them. Thoroughly. But to test you need equipment. Until a couple of months ago the only BD-Live capable player available was the Sony Playstation 3, so that’s what they would have used for final testing.

The Sony PS3 is not a Blu-ray player. It is a games machine that happens to play Blu-ray. It plays Blu-ray very well indeed, but that it is not primarily what it was built for. It was built for games. To do games at this point in the history of humanity, you need a huge amount of processing power to render the images and provide the multiple processing threads required to monitor, direct and respond to all the characters in the game.

In other words, the PS3 has an industrial strength CPU.

Consumer Blu-ray players don’t. So Blu-ray discs tested to proceed at a consumer tolerable (barely) clip for the PS3 meander at a snail’s pace in a dedicated consumer Blu-ray player.

Don’t despair. Now that consumer BD-Live players are available, the disc developers will be under some pressure to test on those and consequently optimise for much faster performance. Equally, people like me will be criticising the speed with which Blu-ray players do stuff, so there will be some pressure to boost the processing power available to them as well.

What, you doubt the power of the market to deliver these results? The startup and load times of the current generation of dedicated consumer Blu-ray players absolutely kill those of earlier models. Give it, um, time. It will happen.

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BD-Live problems

Posted on October 1, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

The other day Sony kindly sent me its new BDP-S550 Blu-ray player, due for release in Australia in November. Aside from some other virtues, this is a BD-Live player. That is, it can support the Web-enabled content becoming increasingly available on Blu-ray discs.

I quickly ran it through its paces with a number of BD-Live discs I had to hand. It worked pretty well — if very slowly — with all of these. Problem is: these were all Sony Pictures Entertainment discs. All these are structured similarly, and give similar BD-Live content: primarily downloadable trailers. So I was keen to see something else.

So I’ve been hassling Universal, trying to get ahold of ‘Heroes’, either Season, since this has BD-Live content. Season 1 would allow me to compare with the HD DVD version. I’m still hopeful this will arrive soon. But this morning Paramount sent me the new super duper two disc Blu-ray of Iron Man. I’m really looking forward to seeing this since it scores an impressive 8.1 on IMDB. But duty came first. I immediately went to check out the BD-Live content.

Problem was, when I tried to access this from the menu, the disc popped up a message saying:

‘NO NETWORK CONNECTION – Your player is not currently connected to the Internet or is not BD-Live capable. [pointless suggestions followed]’

Since the player was currently connected to the Internet and was, apparently, BD-Live capable, I assumed that there was some incompatibility with this particular implementation. I was about the send off an email to Sony, but thought I’d better perform some extra checks. First with the player: I dragged out yet another Sony disc with BD-Live stuff, fired it up and it all worked (albeit slowly) as it was supposed to. So then I loaded the problematic disc in a Playstation 3 I have on (very kind) loan from Sony Computer Entertainment. Since until very recently the PS3 has been the only BD-Live player available, I figured that all BD Live content would be tested on it.

But there was a problem. This performed in an identical manner. That is, not at all with the BD-Live content on this disc, displaying the identical message with regard to their allegedly being no network connection.

I rang up Paramount PR and reported the issue. I thought, perhaps, that this feature hadn’t been enabled for points of origin outside North America, or that it was being held back by some equally trivial issue. Paramount said that they hadn’t had any similar complaints from others. Well, I tend to test the unexpected, so I wasn’t surprised by that.

I googled around a bit, and found that this disc was causing major problems for North American users. But their problem wasn’t mine. Their problem was that the disc would sit there for tens of minutes, even hours, showing a ‘loading’ logo, without proceeding beyond it. Some persisted and eventually it turned out for them that some twelve megabytes of something or other had been downloaded. Others gave up is disgust. Some disconnected, or switched off through their PS3 menus, the Internet, and their discs loaded rapidly, whereupon they could enjoy their movies.

But after a while my problem started to be reported on the same discussion thread.

So, time for a theory. Imagine: you release a popular Blu-ray disc but you’ve made a strategic error: whenever it is loaded it immediately, without asking, goes off to examine an Internet site to see if any additional data is available. There is, and it immediately, without asking, downloads it. This seems to be about 12MB from what I’ve read on this thread.

Now, with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people loading the disc on the first day or two of release, the site slows to a crawl. A certain blue logo seems permanently lodged on the screens on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of TV sets. Some eject the disc and start again, which just makes matters worse. A few are clever, or stumble upon the idea, and yank Internet from their PS3s, and the disc loads quickly and plays nicely. Meanwhile dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people ring your switchboard and demand to know what’s going on.

Their complaint is not that they can’t access the BD-Live feature. Their complaint is that they can’t get the damned movie to play.

What do you do?

One solution might be to take down the site. The disc must have some check routine to see whether the player is both BD-Live capable, and actually connected to the Internet. Maybe this involves some kind of pinging of the site. If you take down the site completely, then the BD-Java routines on the disc might interpret this as you not having a BD-Live capable player, or an Internet connection.

I’m going to make a wild guess and suggest that this is what has happened here.

UPDATE (Thursday, 2 October 2008, 10:26 am): Seems all my theorising was askew. Paramount advises me:

Good News – as our release date is next Thursday – 9th October – the site was not activated as yet – they did this at 5:00am last night so please try this again now and let me know how you go.

With reference to your information about the US – this has nothing to do with Australia as we have a different master to the US master so there is no connection between the two.

 So there you go. Well, it is working, and working very nicely.

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Sony launches new Blu-ray Players, sets feline loose amongst avian rats

Posted on September 24, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Well, Sony has done two launches in two days. Yesterday it unveiled a whole bunch of stuff including a 200Hz LCD TV (apparently it interpolates three new frames between each incoming real picture frame). Another new LCD TV uses hundreds of LEDs for backlighting, and these are individually addressable so they can be brightened and darkened individually in order to provide more precise aspect ratio enhancement.

Apparently just about everything (or so I’ve heard) will be networkable. And Sony has moved its menu system for all its equipment to what it calls XMB, for cross (X) Media Bar. If you are familiar with the PS3, it’s essentially the same menu system that it uses. It’s certainly no worse than any other menu system and the cross-product consistency will be welcome. I didn’t go to that event.

Today was all about Blu-ray and I most certainly went to that launch. I’m glad I did. The emphasis Sony has placed on Blu-ray gives me hope that the format truly will succeed in the mass market.

The Sony BDP-S350 Blu-ray playerWith a view to helping that, Sony says it will be launching a significant publicity campaign very soon on Channel 10 to raise Blu-ray’s profile (it will involve a ‘classic Australian actor’).

Sony will also be releasing two new Blu-ray players. The BDP-S350 will becoming out in October and the BDP-S550 in November. Both of these are BonusView capable (ie. support picture-in-picture and sound-in-sound). Incredibly, both are also BD-Live compliant (they both have Ethernet ports and their firmware will support full BD-Live capability). BD-Live means that they support Internet interactivity where provided on discs. For persistent storage, both provide a USB port. With the BDP-S350 it’s up to you to supply a USB memory stick for storage. With the BDP-S550 you get a 1GB Sony Microvault USB memory stick.

Both are capable of delivering 1080p24 video and bitstream of the new audio standards over HDMI. I forgot to ask, but if the hardware is an enhancement of previous models, then you ought to be able to change the output resolution on the fly using a key on the remote control.

The other major difference (there isn’t much between them visually) between the two concerns audio decoding. Apparently the cheaper model will still decode Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus to multichannel PCM to be delivered via HDMI, but lacks analogue audio output. The BDP-S550 adds 7.1 channel analogue outputs and DTS-HD Master Audio and High Resolution decoding.

The Sony BDP-S550 Blu-ray playerSo Sony is suddenly tripling the number of full BD-Live Blu-ray players on the market (beating, it seems, Panasonic with its unit). But here is where the cat does indeed get amongst the pigeons. The pricing.

The BDP-S350 will enter the market as the cheapest Blu-ray player available, with an RRP of $449! Pretty impressive since the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market at the moment is the Olin OBDP-1000, at $499. The BDP-S550, at a promised RRP of $649, is still lower in price, as I write, than the Samsung BD-P1500 and the Panasonic DMP-BD30. And both of those are, as I write, still BonusView only, not BD-Live (Samsung promises a firmware upgrade for its unit to make it BD-Live some time in the future). By the time it launches, though, I would expect considerable adjustments of RRPs for competing products.

During the launch, Sony showed a graph suggesting that DVD players really took off in Australia late in 2001 once the prices hit the $400 mark. Their, and my, hope is that the same thing happens with Blu-ray.

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At last: Universal Pictures (Australasia) Pty Ltd goes Blu-ray

Posted on September 10, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I’ve been nagging Universal’s PR company on and off over the last couple of months about when the company will be going Blu-ray. Yesterday I received a press release headed: ‘Heroes: Season 2 DVD Release – October 1’. Great for ‘Heroes’ fans, of which I am one, but I was about to use it as an opportunity to take up the Blu-ray issue with Universal again. Fortunately I checked what the release actually said. In brief:

  • ‘Heroes’ Season 2 to be released on 4 disc DVD for $59.95 with a bunch of extras, including a Season 3 sneak peek.
  • Or you can get both Season 1 and 2 as a box set for $99.95.
  • Or you can get ‘Heroes’ Season 2 on Blu-ray for $99.95.
  • Or as a Season 1 on 2 box set on Blu-ray for $179.95.

Release date 1 October 2008.

I’m working with Universal’s PR at the moment to find out more about the company’s Blu-ray release schedule. More as it comes to hand. Meanwhile, remember that Universal had a whole bunch of pretty good movies out on HD DVD prior to that format’s collapse. Porting them over to Blu-ray is, I suspect, a much easier task than creating them in the first place. And with ‘Heroes,’ at least, Universal doesn’t seem to have skimped. The original HD DVD release of ‘Heroes’, Season 1, had both picture-in-picture and Web-enabled content. So, it appears, does the Blu-ray release (and Season 2 as well).

So I guess we can expect such titles as Serenity, Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, King Kong and First Blood out on Blu-ray in the fairly near future.

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Toshiba continues to provide HD DVD support

Posted on September 8, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I am impressed. This afternoon I turned on my Toshiba HD-XE1 HD DVD player for the first time in a month or so. Aside from playing my collection of fifty or so HD DVDs, I find it useful to check the audio decoding capabilities of home theatre receivers since it can deliver Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus and DTS-HD Master Audio as bitstreams over HDMI (the remains the one major weakness of the Sony Playstation 3). Once I’d completed my checks I did a firmware update check via the setup menu and what do you know, but the firmware started updating (over my home network’s ADSL Internet connection). After twenty minutes or so the firmware was now 3.0 rather than 2.9.

Toshiba only says vague stuff about what it does (‘This firmware update improves network connectivity for supporting the download of web-enabled network content associated with certain HD DVD discs, improves certain video and audio processing capabilities, and also addresses certain disc playback and HDMI/DVI related issues identified by Toshiba.’) and I couldn’t see any differences. Still, its pleasing that even though the format is defunct, Toshiba continues to provide support to those who dove in.

UPDATE (A few minutes later): A quick search on my database reveals that I have 72 HD-DVD titles. Of course, some have multiple discs (eg. Star Trek, Heroes and the five disc Blade Runner).

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Deinterlacing Demo

Posted on September 5, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

In the previous post I mentioned grabbing some video for a test clip. Here is a somewhat similar test clip I currently use. Use? Overuse! The clip is 3 minutes and 34.8 seconds long and I’ve watched bits of it hundreds of times. That’s because it is the quickest test of how well a DVD player’s (or TV’s) deinterlacing circuits work. In the image herewith, one full frame from this clip is at the top, while the three details are the valet’s waistcoat, unscaled.

The movie is the 1958 romantic comedy Gigi. That’s Maurice Chevalier at the left.

Moire pattern created by incorrect deinterlacing

It is the waistcoat that is useful here. As you can see from the detail to the left, it has fine dark lines running horizontally over a yellowish background. The frames are progressive, but the PAL DVD has the video flagged as interlaced. This often leads to deinterlacing problems as I’ve previously explained.

The correct way to deinterlace this is simply to weave together the two fields to recreate the original frame. DVD players that do this produce a nice stable picture with full detail, such as that on the left. Some DVD players when doing a conversion to progressive scan, and some TVs when faced with 576i inputs, instead use a ‘bobbing’ deinterlacing technique. That means that instead of weaving together the two fields, they show one of the fields first (scaled up to full screen size and, if a decent quality circuit, with the original 288 horizontal picture lines filled with interpolated lines, created individually in each case from the original line above and the orginal line below it). Then the second field is shown, processed in the same way.

Often, this kind of processing is virtually unnoticable. But you can sometimes see a slight loss of picture sharpness, especially in stable parts of the picture. So more advanced deinterlacers combine weaving and bobbing. For the bits of the picture that aren’t moving, they perform a weave from the two fields, while those bits of the picture that are moving receive a bob. This is a remarkably effective way of doing it and can yield good picture results.

But if the source, like most movie DVDs, is progressive, this is still substandard. And this picture here shows why. This vest is moving. If it is treated as interlaced, rather than progressive, for the purposes of deinterlacing then instead of the fine horizontal lines, you get the course diagonal ones shown in the two details to the right. The middle detail is the same as the left detail, except that I deinterlaced it by discarding the even field and interpolating replacement scan lines. The right detail is also the same, except it was the odd field that was discarded. This I call a moire pattern because it is an artificially created pattern, generated by applying one kind of regular gridded filter to a gridded pattern. You can see, if you look closely, that the pattern differs slightly between the middle and right hand shots.

All this was artificially achieved using Photoshop. But I can assure you that these pictures are exactly what you see on screen when video-style deinterlacing is applied to this clip. But those course diagonal patterns roil around, moving to and fro, as though two sheets of a sheer curtain were blowing in a breeze.

Some clever deinterlacing circuits include a feature called ‘cadence detection’. They examine the content of the picture and attempt to determine whether the video is progressive or interlaced. This particular clip is very challenging, because those horizontal stripes can look a lot like interlaced combing, so virtually all cadence detecting circuits are tricked into thinking that this is interlaced, at least part of the time. That’s why I prefer circuits in which you can force film mode.

Posted in DVD, Interlacing, Testing, Video | Leave a comment