Re: 2.7 Million Blu-ray players in U.S. homes

thats your point. But most people argue that Blu is supposed to be alot better....a few hundred more, and you dont even get all the luxury//Interactive features//PIP // and ease of mind firmware upgrades via ethernet

Plus those are the only Interactive features of today. more could come in the near future.

[Post edited by kucoloco on Dec 7, 2007]

Well, I never argued that HD DVD wasn't a better deal...that's why I chose the format. I just don't think profile 1.1 is a very big deal for the interactive stuff, but just my opinion. I must say though, that the ethernet capability for downloading new firmware is awesome, all electronics companies should have to do this!

I guess it's all rather irrelevant now that the PS3 will soon support PIP, with the first titles having this feature to be released in Jan/08. At that time we can still argue over the color of the cases...

It's important to make the lack of 1.1 a big deal because Blu Ray is touted by so many fanbois to be so much better... and yet there are people who dropped $1200 on a BD player, and can't use all the cool stuff that makes BR better.

We get it forced down our throats that all that extra BD space is for all that extra stuff. Guess they just figured all the PS3 sales would have taken the market, and then it wouldn't matter that people didn't get what they thought they had.

If you've ever used an emulator (which is what the PS3 will be doing since there is NOT a 2nd decoder like HD-DVD), you know that emulators are often times slower, buggy and NEVER as good as a the real hardware.

Some great deals lately on Blu-ray titles (BOGO on Amazon etc), so I've purchased a few. Also, one of the other reasons I purchased a PS3 (for Blu-ray) was for the hi-def music releases too, and several are exclusive to Blu-ray (SonyBMG).

Picked up these recently on Blu-ray - DAVID GILMOUR Live at the Royal Albert Hall, QUEEN Live in Montreal, DAVE MATTHEWS & TIM REYNOLDS Live at Radio City Music Hall, DESTINY'S CHILD Live in Atlanta, ALICE COOPER Live at Montreaux, LED ZEPPELIN The Song Remains the Same (pre-order / and I also bought it on 2-disc standard DVD), THE BLACK CROWES Live, etc... also SHAKIRA has a new concert disc (coming soon on Blu-ray) that's received excellent reviews for the standard DVD.

-Love Hendrix! (The Loverboy)
~ DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray owner ~

shawnwc,

I'm confused about this emulator thing (and *gosh* I'm an engineer). Do you have some technicals I can read up about this?

I was under the impression that the PS3 could still utilize its present GPU for hardware acceleration for a second decoder (and third, forth, fifth, etc.) since it was opted that it would be impractical to include 2 or more entire GPU chips in order to provide asynchronous decoding of multiple video streams in hardware only, even within HD DVD players. I think another part of that decision is that the loss in flexibility, (pure hardware decoding can only ever decode the codec it was designed for), was unacceptable to the HD DVD guys, and bug fixes or improvements could only be effected by switching out actual GPU chips instead of firmware upgrading. Cost of multiple ATI decoder GPUs would be another factor. Hence, just hardware acceleration and a single GPU, to take away an acceptable burden from the CPU no matter how many steams are being decoded.

And lets face it, if my Toshiba HD-A2 had a separate second ATI GPU dedicated to decoding only in hardware, it would seem like a waste considering how small that PIP window is!

To be honest, I'm not sure if the A2 and other second and third generation HD DVD players have a second dedicated GPU for decoding, but I'd find it unlikely since it's really not required. I know the XBox 360 and first generation Toshiba players only have one GPU...

Got more information you can direct me to?

[Post edited by Skyhawk on Dec 7, 2007]

Quote:
Some great deals lately on Blu-ray titles (BOGO on Amazon etc),

You are so right...I picked up some movies to from AMAZON's Warner Bogo. They have the best selection for the bogo that I've seen yet.

The price of Samsung BD P1400 has dropped to $305. An hour back it was $320..http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000TME35W/ref=ord_cart_shr?%5Fencoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance. It does the decoding of TrueHD and DTS HD MA. Very competitive price as compared to similar offerings from Toshiba.

Now it's $299. Nice to see some third party manufacturers starting to lower prices on what is a premium player.