HD200 and Blu-Ray playback?

[cncb]

Originally Posted by Suntan

The question is, would/do you guys think an HD200 would be acceptable as your main/only Bluray playback option?

You should note that there currently is no access to menus and extras if that is important to you.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by IVB

The one thing I noticed is that I cannot output the core to analog stereo outputs; it'll output the core via s/pdif just fine though.

If the core is DD it will output to analog just fine, but the extender can't decode DTS so if you've got DTS-HD MA with DTS core, then no you won't get analog output.

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by TwistedTweaker

I am thinking about adding an HD-PVR to my server and I use Comcast...how is that working for you? Can you pull it down to multiple TV's?

Overall its working pretty well. Occasionally i get botched recordings (massive pixelation and stuttering) and I am not sure if it is comcast's fault or the hd-pvr. Sometimes I know it is comcast's fault because my comcast dvr that records the same show has issues as well. Overall i am very satisfied with the hd-pvr. I use firewire channel changing and SPDIF audio. I only map the HD channels in Sage and not the stations I can get OTA (see below). Honestly I have not tried to stream the same? file to multiple clients... never ran into that situation. I would think though that if this works for other file types (capture devices, formats, etc) there would be no reason why it wouldnt work.

Originally Posted by TwistedTweaker

Why to you use an HDHR and a HD-PVR?

I use the HDHR (2x for 4 tuners) for OTA (I can get all the big networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CW, about 5 PBS stations) via OTA and the quality is usually better (less compression).

[appelm]

Originally Posted by camens

Correct, subtitles for Blu-ray are not supported yet. I would love someone from Sage to confirm they are working on that though....

Originally Posted by stanger89

I thought they said they were in the "Subtitle Support" thread.

Well they aren't working for Mongol. I tried playing the m2ts file on a pc and don't see the subtitles either. The only way I can see the subtitles is playing on a pc using powerdvd.

Is there anyway to use any of the software discussed in this thread (tsmuxer etc) to force the subtitles onto a new movie file that I can then add to my library?

[stanger89]

Sorry meant "were working on it"...

[appelm]

5. Added support for selecting the default subtitle track to enable forced BluRay subtitles to function properly

6.5.13 Beta fixed my subtitle problem. Subtitles now appearing for Mongol!!

[Dravor]

Originally Posted by appelm

6.5.13 Beta fixed my subtitle problem. Subtitles now appearing for Mongol!!

It's odd, a couple times now I've gone to play a movie, and the subtitles are automatically on. If I stop it, and start playing it again, it goes away.

Is there any plan on supporting BR structure within an iso as well?

-Dravor

[OldPCGUY]

Originally Posted by IVB

yep, i'm actually selling off my standalone BluRay player as it's working that well for me.

So I picked up a BlueRay Drive, and purchased a Blue Ray Movie I had in DVD. ('The Day After Tommorow')

We have a 42 In 60Hz Vizio 1080P.

The Blue Ray movie and DVD movie play back in Wide Screen Format with black spacing above and below the picture. ASPECT 101 has a nice writeup on the reasons for this.

In any case this reduces my 42 inch display to something less and as a result the BlueRay only looked slightly better. If I had a 50 inch screen or sat closer than 6 feet then we would see a much bigger difference.

For Films soruced in HDTV aspect ratio then the difference would be more significant. For example Broadcast ATSC HD Shows and especially HD sporting events look way better than DVD. Most of these are 720P or 1080I.

So my wife and I were very supprised by this. We were expecting Blue Ray to look similar or better than ATSC HD.

So we are sticking with DVD for the following reasons.

1. Most Movies are filmed with a wider asptect ratio than our HDTV.
2. Blue Ray Movies are huge 49Gbytes per disk and roughly 32Gbytes for the main movie.
3. Writable Blue Ray Media is very expensive
4. Blue Ray Players, and RW Drives are expensive

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by OldPCGUY

The Blue Ray movie and DVD movie play back in Wide Screen Format with black spacing above and below the picture. ASPECT 101 has a nice writeup on the reasons for this.

In any case this reduces my 42 inch display to something less and as a result the BlueRay only looked slightly better. If I had a 50 inch screen or sat closer than 6 feet then we would see a much bigger difference.

To each their own but a Blu-ray movie should look MUCH better than a DVD. What resolution are you sending to your TV from your HD200? How is it connected to your TV?

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by OldPCGUY

So I picked up a BlueRay Drive, and purchased a Blue Ray Movie I had in DVD. ('The Day After Tommorow')

We have a 42 In 60Hz Vizio 1080P.

The Blue Ray movie and DVD movie play back in Wide Screen Format with black spacing above and below the picture. ASPECT 101 has a nice writeup on the reasons for this.

In any case this reduces my 42 inch display to something less and as a result the BlueRay only looked slightly better. If I had a 50 inch screen or sat closer than 6 feet then we would see a much bigger difference.

Yeah, if you sit quite a ways away, the difference will be less than staggering.

For Films soruced in HDTV aspect ratio then the difference would be more significant. For example Broadcast ATSC HD Shows and especially HD sporting events look way better than DVD. Most of these are 720P or 1080I.

So my wife and I were very supprised by this. We were expecting Blue Ray to look similar or better than ATSC HD.

AR should have nothing to do with it, the resolution is the same, only the size is different. But this brings up another thing that many don't realize/think about.

There are two ways content is recorded/created. Film and Video. Sports, documentaries and such are shot on HD Video, with HD Cameras that capture content with digital sensor as "high" framerates (30/60fps). Movies, and most TV shows (dramas, etc), these are shot on film stock and a lower frame rate (24fps).

All that technobable means that HD Video tends to have that razor-sharp, vivid, smooth picture most people think of when they think of "HDTV". This is what's quite often used when demoing HDTVs. Movies on the other hand are almost universally shot on film, and I guess I'd say the improvent is not as "smack you in the face" as with HD Video.

Now all that said, a good Blu-ray will easily, and noticably, best the best ATSC/broadcast content if it's "like" content (ie film vs film).

The other thing is NTSC TV is pretty bad to start with, where DVD is pretty good, so NTSC->ATSC is a much bigger jump than DVD->Blu-ray.

[Suntan]

Originally Posted by OldPCGUY

We have a 42 In 60Hz Vizio 1080P. ...as a result the BlueRay only looked slightly better.

I know what you mean, and this has been the reason why, up until now, I have not bothered upgrading to Blu Ray. Once the basement is finished though, the screen size will be 9x the area of a 42" TV set.

-Suntan

[appelm]

I clearly see an improvement. I have Iron Man both on DVD and BluRay. I was watching Iron Man on BluRay and stopped about half-way through. Later, my wife started watching Iron Man without me on regular DVD (not knowing she should select the bluray version). When I came in the room I could immediately tell she wasn't watching BluRay. It actually surprised me how poor the DVD image was compared to BluRay. Okay it wasn't as stark a difference as standard TV vs HiDef. But a very nice improvement none the less. I am watching on a 61" screen though.. Perhaps the difference on a 42" is not as noticeable.

I will add that animated movies on BluRay look absolutely stunning. Madagascar 2 and Horton Hears a Who look amazing. BluRay makes watching those with your kid a lot more fun.

[voidpt]

Interesting this discussion about SD vs HD. I did some comparisons a few months back on a Norwegian forum I frequent. We had just gotten an HD edition of a local channel ('TVNorge') in addition to the regular SD channel. Because I have two DVB-C tuners I could record the excact same programs in on both SD and HD. The discussions on the forum went from people who could not see the difference. People who claimed that upscaled SD matched the HD, so no need for HD. The other way around, and so on.

I did two still comparison shots. First from Bad Company movie, second from the Rome series. They are shown below in this post. First a little data about the sources these are taken from, and how they were processed. Here are the technical details (on the DVB-C streams):
- SD: 720x576 25fps - about 4.0Mbit MPEG2 video (720 x-axis scaled through 16:9 flag)
- HD: 1920x1088 25fps - about 15.7Mbit MPEG4/H.264 video
The short of it is that the HD signal has about 4x times the pixels as SD (about 0.5mp vs 2.0mp). Most HD channels I've seen on cable uses about 4x the bandwith for HD vs SD. In this case 4.0 vs 15.7. In addition the MPEG4/H.264 format is better than MPEG2, so you gain some details there to. The shots below are both taken in 1920x1080 on my computer, through PowerDVD 8.x as decoder. They both gain whatever intelligence/scaling the PowerDVD engine provides. The shots are cropped from the full picture, so what you are seeing are 1:1 pixel (except that SD material was scaled to HD before screenshot). Stored as JPG picture with low compression. HD material would be hurt most by this anyway.

What I claimed in my original post, and still do, is that I cannot give an absolute answer for everyone on the difference between HD and SD. It's to personal and too many variables. What TV are one watching the material on? Distance to TV? What components/engines do the material pass through? How is the TV adjusted? What kind of program are one watching (nature,film,action,drama)? How good is the original material? How was it mastered to get HD edition? What is important for the person watching (the story or the picture quality)?

It was the scaling claims from SD to HD that bugged me in the original forum. If you take some optimal material that has been produced to high quality 1080(HD), lets say 20.0Mbit MPEG4/H.264. Scale this material down to 576(SD) version, in 5.0Mbit MPEG2. Whatever people claim, the 5.0Mbit MPEG2 contains less information than 20.0Mbit MPEG4/H.264. You can have the best upscaling engine available to show the 576(SD) data on a 1080(HD) display. Details will be lost. The real 1080(HD) version will have more detail to work with. And if someone still claims that 576(SD) upscaled is good enough. Well, same logic can be used to scale 1080(HD) material to 2160(QuadHD). It will never be the same. Again, perceived quality is something else. Just taking the technical aspect here

My personal observation is that if you start the evening of watching something in SD and then go to HD material at some point. You don't react as much. But if you start watching something in HD, then at some point turn to SD material, it's a depressing change in quality

Comparison: "Bad Company"
http://www.miwsoft.com/_temp/2008100...ge_Compare.jpg

Comparison: "Rome"
http://www.miwsoft.com/_temp/2008100...me_Compare.jpg

[Dravor]

Should we be able to switch through the different audio tracks? Tried playing back the Simpson's movie in BR, and could only get the commentary.

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by Dravor

Should we be able to switch through the different audio tracks? Tried playing back the Simpson's movie in BR, and could only get the commentary.

Yes you should be able to... press options button while playing back a disc and then there should be a audio languages option that brings up a dialog with all the tracks in it...

[Dravor]

Originally Posted by razrsharpe

Yes you should be able to... press options button while playing back a disc and then there should be a audio languages option that brings up a dialog with all the tracks in it...

Tried this for 'The Simpsons' and when the audio options/languages comes up it has no choices?

I'll check some other movies as well.

Thanks!

[razrsharpe]

Originally Posted by razrsharpe

Issue 1: Have tried this so far on 2 blurays. On Casino Royale it starts playback from the beginning of the filer, at time = 00:00:00, but at chapter 9/16 (what sage thinks the chapter is). From there I can chapter skip succefully one chapter at a time (to the right time in the file) but the chapter number is wrong. Any ideas? could I be remuxing improperly. I ran BDinfo on the created BDMV folder and all seemed kosher, and used eac3to to extract the chapter and again all seemed ok.

Issue 2: On Quantum of Solace it starts playback from the begining of the file, but at time = 26:30:49 (26 hours, 30 min, 49 sec), and chapter 19/29. Navigating directly to the .m2ts file the time information (and timebar graphic) is correct and I can skip forward/back through the file (can not do that playing BDMV).

Originally Posted by razrsharpe

So it appears this is an issue in the way tsmuxer authors the disk. Specifically, the way the mpls (playlist) file sets the Time In value. This is the time that playback starts at the beginning of the file. So this explains why the chapter information is off. I was able to confirm this by modifying the original mpls file to point to the correct m2ts (video) file and confirmed correct chapter info/playback in sage

I wrote a small console application to the fix the playlist issue described above when using TSMuxer to remux your bluray disk

See here: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41722

[Stuntman]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Wow this really works fantastic, Sage did a great job

I just hooked up a BR drive, installed AnyDVD, added the drive as an import folder, and started watching Bluray movies on my HD200. The whole process couldn't have taken more than ~5 minutes (and $200 ).

Does this same process work for the STX-HD100 extenders as well??

[Clift]

Originally Posted by Stuntman

Does this same process work for the STX-HD100 extenders as well??

Witht he latest beta firmware it does. But do a search and you will see that some high bitrate Blu-rays can tend to stutter. IIRC the issue is with the audio codec (DTS Master) and maybeVC-1 encoded discs.

[stanger89]

I believe so, but the HD100's decoder might not have the guts for all BDs.