A lot of Blu-ray discs come with a book marking facility. Such facilities have appeared over the years on a number of DVD players. Most were utterly useless, since the moment you popped the disc out your bookmarks were wiped. However my first DVD player, the Sony DVP-S725, had a persistent bookmark feature. It maintained a bit of non-volatile memory in which it kept the status of the last two hundred discs that you played, including any bookmarks you cared to insert.<\/p>\n
That was at the hardware level.<\/p>\n
Blu-ray bookmarks at done at the software level. Of the 113 Blu-ray discs I have examined exhaustively, 28 have a bookmark facility, and 85 do not. Although the implementation is in software, persistent storage built into the Blu-ray player is used. Even grace period players are required to have 64kB of this. So if you save a bookmark on a suitably equipped Blu-ray disc, you will be able to come back to that point weeks or months into the future, despite having played other discs in the meantime.<\/p>\n
But it comes at a cost. Because it is implemented in software, the player needs to load in a chunk of BD-Java programming code as it’s starting up. I’m not sure if this is necessarily the case in theory, but in practice Blu-ray players are incapable of restarting from the same place in a movie as where they were stopped if BD-Java code is loaded. Instead, all such discs must go through the entire boot up sequence again, including trailers, copyright warnings and so on.<\/p>\n
An easy restart from where you stopped is nice if you have a remote control that allows you to accidentally stop a movie too easily. Hit ‘Play’, and you’re back into the action within a few seconds. But that restart point isn’t retained over time.<\/p>\n
I think I prefer bookmarks, but it doesn’t come without cost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A lot of Blu-ray discs come with a book marking facility. Such facilities have appeared over the years on a number of DVD players. Most were utterly useless, since the moment you popped the disc out your bookmarks were wiped. … Continue reading