Dangbei Projector
Member
Dolby has confirmed that existing Ultra HD Blu-ray players can potentially handle Dolby Vision 2 without a new optical drive or a redesigned player. Most of the new processing lives inside the television. The player's job is to recognise the signal, format it correctly and push it and its metadata down the HDMI cable. On paper that is a firmware problem, not a hardware one.
Then Sony told TechRadar it has no current plan to update its existing player lineup. Which is the whole story in one sentence. Dolby also admits enabling this still takes engineering time, HDMI validation and a firmware release, so somebody has to decide the work is worth doing on a product that was already sold.
Look at who is left in this category and you can guess how that decision goes. Oppo walked away in 2018. Samsung exited in 2019. LG stopped building them too. The remaining players come from a very short list of companies, and a disc spinner earns its money once, at the till. There is no subscription behind it, no ad load, no store, nothing that makes a two year old unit worth another round of engineering. A streaming box gets updated because the box is a shopfront. A player is furniture.
The practical damage today is zero, because there is no DV2 disc to play. The part that bothers me is the precedent for anyone who just spent four figures on a reference deck expecting a long service life.
If your player never gets it, does the TV doing DV2 on the incoming stream get you most of the way there anyway, or does the metadata have to come off the disc for it to mean anything?
Then Sony told TechRadar it has no current plan to update its existing player lineup. Which is the whole story in one sentence. Dolby also admits enabling this still takes engineering time, HDMI validation and a firmware release, so somebody has to decide the work is worth doing on a product that was already sold.
Look at who is left in this category and you can guess how that decision goes. Oppo walked away in 2018. Samsung exited in 2019. LG stopped building them too. The remaining players come from a very short list of companies, and a disc spinner earns its money once, at the till. There is no subscription behind it, no ad load, no store, nothing that makes a two year old unit worth another round of engineering. A streaming box gets updated because the box is a shopfront. A player is furniture.
The practical damage today is zero, because there is no DV2 disc to play. The part that bothers me is the precedent for anyone who just spent four figures on a reference deck expecting a long service life.
If your player never gets it, does the TV doing DV2 on the incoming stream get you most of the way there anyway, or does the metadata have to come off the disc for it to mean anything?
