Gabe
Member
Home Cinema Choice has a look back at how Blu-ray got started, and it prompted a memory I would rather not have. Everyone tells the format war story the same way - Blu-ray against HD DVD, studios picking sides, Warner flipping and the whole thing collapsing inside a few weeks. That part is well worn.
The part that actually cost people money was the profiles. Blu-ray shipped before the spec was finished, so launch hardware supported the base profile only, and later discs kept adding things the early players had no path to. Picture-in-picture commentary, then BD-Live network features. If you bought at launch you did not get a firmware update to fix it, because in several cases the hardware simply lacked the storage or the second decoder. You had a player that played discs and a stack of discs whose menus advertised features it could never run.
The machine that came out best was the PS3, which had enough hardware headroom and a company willing to keep updating it. Sony effectively won its own format war using a games console as the trojan horse, and a lot of people who bought a dedicated player early got a worse deal than people who bought it for Metal Gear.
Worth remembering now because UHD Blu-ray shipped with the spec locked down and it has been remarkably boring in exactly the right way. Buy a player from any year and it plays the discs. That is the actual achievement.
Did anyone here get burned by a Profile 1.0 player, and did the retailer do anything about it, or was that just tough luck?
The part that actually cost people money was the profiles. Blu-ray shipped before the spec was finished, so launch hardware supported the base profile only, and later discs kept adding things the early players had no path to. Picture-in-picture commentary, then BD-Live network features. If you bought at launch you did not get a firmware update to fix it, because in several cases the hardware simply lacked the storage or the second decoder. You had a player that played discs and a stack of discs whose menus advertised features it could never run.
The machine that came out best was the PS3, which had enough hardware headroom and a company willing to keep updating it. Sony effectively won its own format war using a games console as the trojan horse, and a lot of people who bought a dedicated player early got a worse deal than people who bought it for Metal Gear.
Worth remembering now because UHD Blu-ray shipped with the spec locked down and it has been remarkably boring in exactly the right way. Buy a player from any year and it plays the discs. That is the actual achievement.
Did anyone here get burned by a Profile 1.0 player, and did the retailer do anything about it, or was that just tough luck?
