kingofmyheart
Member
This is the bit of the Dolby Vision 2 rollout that's going to annoy people. Dolby has confirmed that existing Ultra HD Blu-ray players can potentially work with the new format without a new optical drive or a rebuilt player architecture, because most of the processing lives in the TV. The player's job is to recognise the signal, format it correctly and push it out over HDMI. That's a firmware problem, not a hardware problem.
Which means it comes down entirely to whether the manufacturer feels like doing the work. Dolby itself acknowledges that enabling it still takes engineering time, HDMI validation and firmware development. And Sony has already told TechRadar it has no current plan to update its existing Blu-ray player lineup. So you can own a machine that is technically capable of the thing and never see it, purely because nobody upstairs signed off on the budget.
Hard to be shocked, given the state of this category. Oppo walked away from disc players in 2018 and Samsung exited in 2019. The remaining players are a low-volume business propped up by people who care about bitrate, and low-volume businesses do not fund firmware teams to retrofit formats onto hardware they already sold you. If DV2 ends up mattering for discs, my guess is it arrives on a new model with a new price rather than on your shelf.
What I'd like to know before anyone spends money: has anyone seen a single disc player maker publicly commit to a DV2 firmware update? Because right now the only concrete statement out there is a no.
Which means it comes down entirely to whether the manufacturer feels like doing the work. Dolby itself acknowledges that enabling it still takes engineering time, HDMI validation and firmware development. And Sony has already told TechRadar it has no current plan to update its existing Blu-ray player lineup. So you can own a machine that is technically capable of the thing and never see it, purely because nobody upstairs signed off on the budget.
Hard to be shocked, given the state of this category. Oppo walked away from disc players in 2018 and Samsung exited in 2019. The remaining players are a low-volume business propped up by people who care about bitrate, and low-volume businesses do not fund firmware teams to retrofit formats onto hardware they already sold you. If DV2 ends up mattering for discs, my guess is it arrives on a new model with a new price rather than on your shelf.
What I'd like to know before anyone spends money: has anyone seen a single disc player maker publicly commit to a DV2 firmware update? Because right now the only concrete statement out there is a no.
