You're viewing an article in iPO's historic archive vault. Here, we've preserved the comments and how the site looked along with the article. Use this link to view the article on our current site: Explaining Blu-ray Profiles 1.0. 1.1 and 2.0

News

Explaining Blu-ray Profiles 1.0. 1.1 and 2.0

Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 3:20 PM - by

The Blu-ray Dic Association haas defined three different sets of hardware requirements and software capabilities for Blu-ray players, according to CNET Australia on Thursday. Most players shipped in 2007 were Blu-ray Profile 1.0. Many current and high end players now shipping support Profile 1.1 (BonusView) and Profile 2.0 (BD-Live). Shoppers looking for a Blu-ray player for the holidays will want to note the differences.

Profile 1.0 meets the minimum requirement for simply playing back Blu-ray discs. No local storage is required in the player, and an Ethernet connection not required.

Profile 1.1, also known as BonusView, adds picture-in-picture capability for a mode in which a director or actor can talk about a scene while it's happening. That requires an additional video decoder. Not many Blu-ray discs have shipped with BonusView in the past, but now many discs include it. The player must have 256 MB of storage.


Sony BDP-S350 (Profile 1.1, 2.0 "ready")

Profile 2.0, also known as BD-Live, requires the player to have an Ethernet connection to download content in addition to requiring 1 GB of local storage. This allows downloadable trailers and customer chat functions.

Some players, like the Sony BDP-S350 (MSRP $400) are Profile 1.1 and can be upgraded to BD-Live with a firmware update.

Customers who just want to watch movies can likely find deeply discounted Profile 1.0 players this Christmas. However, some players without Ethernet connections have had reported problems playing a few discs, so look for the ability to update the firmware via Ethernet, while staying at Profile 1.0, to fix those problems. Otherwise, it may require the user to use a PC to download an update file, burn a DVD, and manually update.

Blu-ray players that shipped without local storage and at Profile 1.0 can still have firmware updates, but cannot obtain 1.1 functionality unless they also have the hardware storage and pic-in-pic decoder. On example is the Samsung BD-P1400.

Others who want the interactive features will need to look for Profile 1.1 or 2.0 players this holiday. One well known player, the Sony PS3, is Profile 2.0, (or can be upgraded to 2.0), and that game console/player has proven to be highly future-proofed.

There is an emerging Profile 3.0, but that is restricted to audio-only Blu-ray discs.

The combination of Profile state, upgradability and Ethernet, local storage, various options for higher standard sound (including Dolby Digital Plus and uncompressed audio like Dolby TrueHD), the quality of the scaler for DVDs, the kind of outputs on the back and other exotic but rarely used features like 12-bit Deep Color will dictate the price of a Blu-ray player, from fire sale Profile 1.0 players at perhaps $199 to top of the line players from Pioneer, like the Elite BDP-05FD, priced at over US$700.

5 comments from the community.

You can post your own below.

+ show options

Your current settings, click to change: Sort Oldest First, Show Guest Posts, Hide Community Stats

A guest said: (hide)

Thu Sep 11, 2008 5:30 pm

Hopefully Blu-ray will just fade away quietly! I love my extensive library of standard DVD's! Even on a huge state of the art 56" 1080i flat creeen, the picture is "good enough"!

Quote this post ↓

j.martellaro said:

member since 07 Dec 2006 with 97 posts, TMO Staff, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Sep 11, 2008 6:10 pm

I tend to lean, instead, towards "fabulous"

- J.M.

Quote this post ↓

ctopher said:

member since 25 Aug 2006 with 134 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Sep 12, 2008 2:01 pm

Mr. Martellaro, you lean towards "fabulous" but I, without a shred of evidence save my own opinion, think the Guest better represents the marketplace. The marketplace has accepted DVD and invested. They did so over VHS because DVD was a huge change. DVD:

* Does not have to be rewound

* Does not wear out

* Allows random access

* Smaller media size

Of course there were other reasons like image and audio quality, but (again, based on my thinking alone) I don't think those were the reasons the masses adopted the medium.

Now here comes Blu-ray, seemingly the same disks, the same physical size with the same random access capability. I would think that the masses see the quality improvements as evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Of course mass adoption requires lower cost and until Blu-ray players are on par with today's DVD players it's not going to happen. But I don't think there's the same "pull" from the market that DVD had. The VHS stalwarts did all they could to improve image and audio quality to a point where it may be tough on a standard definition TV to tell the difference between DVD and VHS, but DVD won because of the other revolutionary features. DVD players are adding HDMI and progressive scan outputs that give a near Blu-ray quality to a standard DVD. In fact to my eyes, a DVD looks better on my flat panel TV than the Hi-def cable channels!

One feature I haven't talked about is capacity, which is also evolutionary. But what's being done with all that capacity? DVD extras? I for one LOVE DVD extras and I'll stay up an extra hour or 2 after the movie is over (and my wife has long since gone to bed) watching all the featurettes. But when asking my movie watching friends (with Net flix accounts and everything) if they also watch the extras and I find that very few do.

So DVD's look better on today's Hi-Def TVs, the masses have already invested in hardware and software and Blu-ray only offers more of the same. I think it'll be an uphill battle with you "fabulous" early adopters pushing us along.

And not to sound too much like a Luddite but I'm not sure I want a player that can phone home! (And I have a router behind my TV for my DVR!)

All that being said, if I could buy a $100 Profile 1.0 Blu-ray player today, AND I could rent the discs for the same price as today's DVD, I just might invest.

Off-Topic, but why wasn't this article included in the RSS feed? I almost missed it!

Quote this post ↓

j.martellaro said:

member since 07 Dec 2006 with 97 posts, TMO Staff, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Sep 12, 2008 3:34 pm

I use the Vienna RSS reader. Looking at iPod Observer from yesterday, I see the article in the feeds.

-J.M.

Quote this post ↓

ctopher said:

member since 25 Aug 2006 with 134 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Sat Sep 13, 2008 5:06 pm

I'm using standard Firefox. I guess they just didn't put this one on the Mac Observer feed:

<http://feeds.pheedo.com/the_mac_observer>

All of the other September 11, 2008 articles are there. I think this happens every once in awhile because I come across a story that is not on that feed that's mentioned under "Recent Articles" I suppose I should subscribe to the iPod Observer RSS feed...

Thanks for the "feed" back!

Quote this post ↓

Post Your Comments

  Remember Me

Not a member? Register now. You can post comments without logging in, but they'll show up as a "guest" post.


Please enter the word exactly as you see it in the image above. Registered users aren't prompted for this. Having trouble reading the image get a new one.