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Blue ray players remembering positions after turning off

post #1 of 20
11/29/08 at 9:35pm
Thread Starter 
I picked up Panasonic BD35 few days ago- reviews are good and it was on sale. It did have few glitches but nothing major- save one thing. With Blue Ray disks (at least with the one disk I've tried) it does not remember where I was in the movie if I turn it off.
To clarify, I am talking about following:
I start playing the movie
I decide to finish it later (tomorrow?)- I turn off the player (along with all other components)
I come back "later", turn the player on and ... it starts with "previews". This is kinda grustrating especially since every cheapest DVD player will remember DVD disk position (Panasonic does remember position for DVDs).

So, the question is whether this is a "feature" of this Panasonic player or is this same for all Blue Ray players (due to the nature of the spec, application programming, whatever the hell else)? Are there players that save the context? Can my player save the context- maybe I'm doing something wrong? Thouhts?

Thank you/
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post #2 of 20
11/30/08 at 7:57am
Quote:
Originally Posted by gverig View Post

It did have few glitches but nothing major- save one thing.

I have a BD35 and haven't seen any "glitches", so I don't know what you mean by this.

Quote:
Originally Posted by gverig View Post

With Blue Ray disks (at least with the one disk I've tried) it does not remember where I was in the movie if I turn it off.

If this was on a disc with BD-J (many of them are), then yes, this is normal behavior. The player can't save the state of the Java VM, which is tightly tied to the disc state - so resume isn't available.

Quote:
Originally Posted by gverig View Post

So, the question is whether this is a "feature" of this Panasonic player or is this same for all Blue Ray players (due to the nature of the spec, application programming, whatever the hell else)?

This is the way *all* Blu-Ray players work with BD-J titles. It's not a failing of the Panasonic. Every model, even the vaunted PS3, is unable to resume after stop with a BD-J disc.
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post #3 of 20
11/30/08 at 12:13pm
Thread Starter 
On glitches- well, there was only one. When I was trying the same thing (play-turn off-turn on) on a regular DVD at some point sound disappeared and wouldn't come back until I turned player off and turned on again (not sure what I did, what happened, etc- that wasn't really the question for the thread, just making small talk).

On BD-J... well, this sucks. How do I tell whether a disk is BD-J or not (I know it won't affect whether I buy it or not, just want to know...).

Thanks for your reply, btw!
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post #4 of 20
11/30/08 at 12:56pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by demonfoo View Post

If this was on a disc with BD-J

Can you please elaborate on what a BD-J is?

Ed
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post #5 of 20
11/30/08 at 3:40pm
Thread Starter 
ekb,
I have very vague understanding of the blue ray stack so this might be just gibberish- take it with a grain of salt.
BD-J is a part of Blue Ray specification requiring all Blue Ray players to support java (with defined minimum functionality and blue-ray specific APIs). You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J
From demonfoo's post I gather that while players are required to support BD-J, disks *may* choose to use BD-J to program content (menus, interactive content, etc.) or may opt for more traditional DVD-like setup. Basically, look at it this way: blue ray disk can be just video data with some simple definitions like akin to DVD OR it can have an application in java language with more rich interaction cababilities. There was a presentaiton of Neil Young's blue ray anthology disk that displayed some of the more advanced functionalities made possible- you can google it.
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post #6 of 20
11/30/08 at 3:53pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by gverig View Post

On glitches- well, there was only one. When I was trying the same thing (play-turn off-turn on) on a regular DVD at some point sound disappeared and wouldn't come back until I turned player off and turned on again (not sure what I did, what happened, etc- that wasn't really the question for the thread, just making small talk).

That's odd. Was it only with that one disc? Was it reproducible at the same point?

Quote:
Originally Posted by gverig View Post

On BD-J... well, this sucks. How do I tell whether a disk is BD-J or not (I know it won't affect whether I buy it or not, just want to know...).

I believe there's a thread elsewhere in the forums, probably under the Blu-Ray Software thread; however, there's a partial list in the Wikipedia BD-J article. Most recently released titles make use of BD-J. However, many of the same titles provide a bookmarking facility - if you press the "Pop-up Menu" button (should be labeled something like that on your remote), and look for an item labeled "Chapter Selection" or "Scenes" or similar, there's typically the option to bookmark the current playback location. It's not quite as convenient as playback resume with DVDs, but it does allow you to get back to the same location without having to scratch your head and try to recall where you were.

Quote:
Originally Posted by ekb View Post

Can you please elaborate on what a BD-J is?

BD-J is a system derived from Java (by way of another technology known as MHP) which provides advanced interactivity and media control functions via a set of Java bindings, UI elements and so on. It provides a more complex (some would say "rich") interaction layer than DVD's much simpler navigation VM, at the expense of (a) resume functionality and (b) a certain amount of loading time at disc startup, while the Java VM loads and imports classes and so on. (HD-DVD had a similar system called HDi, which was actually based on XML and ECMAscript; I don't know if the load times were similar, but it had the same lack of resume functionality, for similar reasons.)
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post #7 of 20
11/30/08 at 5:25pm
It would appear that the designers of the Blu-ray specs really missed a number of key points about the user experience. This is one of them.

People went for a quarter century reinserting their VHS tapes into the VCR and "restoring the context". Now they are told that, in order to have all of the "benefits" of Blu-ray, they will have to forego this convenience.

We are told that BD-J titles cannot (or will not!) remember the position that the user was previously in. Hogwash!

The problem is one of "persistence", in computer-science terms. One must write the code so that the state of playing the disk is saved in the player's memory and then restored when the same disk is inserted.

Exactly how much data must be save/restored is likely to be a function of the complexity of the Java code, but clearly it is a well-defined problem.

If a child can remember what scene the movie was playing, the computer can remember it too!

Since I am not particularly interested in the BD-J/BD-Plus/BD-Live functionality (I have never used any of it at all!), I have no sympathy for this problem at all.

This must be solved.
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post #8 of 20
11/30/08 at 5:42pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by rlsmith View Post

We are told that BD-J titles cannot (or will not!) remember the position that the user was previously in. Hogwash!

The problem isn't simply "remember[ing] the position the user was previously in"; due to the fact that the entire playback session is controlled by the BD-J code, the Java VM state would need to be saved along with it. If you just remember which title and what time offset, (a) you lose in-movie menus, and (b) when the title ends, you're in an unknown state; I suppose it could just dump back to the start of the disc, like it was just inserted, but apparently they decided that keeping consistent state and not dealing with the unknown state problem was preferable. (I can appreciate why they'd make that choice.)

Quote:
Originally Posted by rlsmith View Post

The problem is one of "persistence", in computer-science terms. One must write the code so that the state of playing the disk is saved in the player's memory and then restored when the same disk is inserted.

Don't think it's going to happen, no. *Every* BD-J title would have to be altered to serialize its state when a "stop" event occurs so that it could be saved - and this would be a problem for Profile 1.0 players (um, I only have 64k of storage, wtf do I do with all this serialized data)? I'm a CS grad myself, so I understand the technical complexities; unfortunately what you're asking for is not practical. It can't simply be tacked on now, and I guess the designers didn't think it was particularly important when the spec was being written.

Quote:
Originally Posted by rlsmith View Post

If a child can remember what scene the movie was playing, the computer can remember it too!

See above. Not as simple as "what title and time offset was I at?" - the entire Java VM's state would have to be saved, which (without the redesign I mentioned) would require saving all the VM's memory (since you don't know what's relevant and what's not).

Quote:
Originally Posted by rlsmith View Post

Since I am not particularly interested in the BD-J/BD-Plus/BD-Live functionality (I have never used any of it at all!), I have no sympathy for this problem at all.

It may suck, but it's a problem that can't be solved by tacking on a solution now. It would require serious overhauling of its operation, and every BD-J-using title (there are a lot of them) would need to be made to handle it correctly. Ever seen what a mess power management is in Windows? Take that times 100. That's how big a mess it would be. It would be *ugly*.

Besides, as I said before, bookmarks. Learn them. Love them.
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post #9 of 20
11/30/08 at 9:35pm
Thread Starter 
rlsmith,
as demonfoo said, it's not quite as simple but "hear hear"- this is dumb and I'm sure it'll be handled- either on spec lever or as a standard feature for future implementations.
demonfoo,
there is in fact a number of things that can be done. Easiest is providing an application level hook (which may be already provided) saying "player is shutting down, do whatever you need, if anything". You don't have to serialize full VM, only the "context", which can also be handled on the spec level (as a specific area to store information, for instance). Either way, poor excuse, features like this should have been thought through. If I can use my pocket knife to do a million things but can't carve meat- it's a crappy pocket knife.

On the glitch- I am not sure how I got to do this, I'll experiment when I have a bit more time. I might also need a software update- player isn't hooked up to the network right now.

Either way, thanks for you responses and the help. You answered all my questions- rest is just me rambling.
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post #10 of 20
12/1/08 at 3:08am
Quote:
Originally Posted by demonfoo View Post

The problem isn't simply "remember[ing] the position the user was previously in"; due to the fact that the entire playback session is controlled by the BD-J code, the Java VM state would need to be saved along with it. If you just remember which title and what time offset, (a) you lose in-movie menus, and (b) when the title ends, you're in an unknown state; I suppose it could just dump back to the start of the disc, like it was just inserted, but apparently they decided that keeping consistent state and not dealing with the unknown state problem was preferable. (I can appreciate why they'd make that choice.)



Don't think it's going to happen, no. *Every* BD-J title would have to be altered to serialize its state when a "stop" event occurs so that it could be saved - and this would be a problem for Profile 1.0 players (um, I only have 64k of storage, wtf do I do with all this serialized data)? I'm a CS grad myself, so I understand the technical complexities; unfortunately what you're asking for is not practical. It can't simply be tacked on now, and I guess the designers didn't think it was particularly important when the spec was being written.



See above. Not as simple as "what title and time offset was I at?" - the entire Java VM's state would have to be saved, which (without the redesign I mentioned) would require saving all the VM's memory (since you don't know what's relevant and what's not).



It may suck, but it's a problem that can't be solved by tacking on a solution now. It would require serious overhauling of its operation, and every BD-J-using title (there are a lot of them) would need to be made to handle it correctly. Ever seen what a mess power management is in Windows? Take that times 100. That's how big a mess it would be. It would be *ugly*.

Besides, as I said before, bookmarks. Learn them. Love them.

You are all missing the point. If you can manually bookmark it, then the player could bookmark it when you pushed stop, or off automatically. Not that big a deal. My guess would be that the people who wrote the software, as usual, never actually used it.
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post #11 of 20
12/1/08 at 3:28am
And they dare call Blu-ray a revolution.
Every simple dvd player I ever owned, had a memory for at least 6 discs.
No simple dvd player I ever owned needed a firmware upgrade to be able to play certain discs.
None of them ever needed 60 seconds and more before starting to play a disc.
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post #12 of 20
12/1/08 at 12:13pm
Thread Starter 
xit2050 - I couldn't agree with you more! Even more obnoxious, my MS DOS 3.2 would start up MUCH faster than these hyped up OS X or Windows! Same functionality, BTW, all are operating systems!

Cary B,
Yes and no. Onus is on different people here. With DVDs you had a movie (few mpeg 4 files and some meta information usually) so player manufacturer controlled actual movie playback and could say "I know what player is doing right now, I'll save THAT". With blue ray spec (BD-J specifically) in its worst case you have a program that's doing something and player isn't really sure what and even less sure what represents "state" - what to do when user clicks "back" or "up" or "rewind". It's application developer's (disk producer's) responsibility to provide this functionality (sidebar: you don't expect your computer or your Microsoft Windows to remember state of the Word document or your game, you expect the developer of that application to do this). Now, if there is an ability to hook into "about to shut down" events, then it's disk producer's screw up for not using it to capture where to restart movie from. If there isn't, then BD-J spec screwed up BIG TIME since this is one of the basic things that even java itself provides on other platforms.
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post #13 of 20
12/1/08 at 2:43pm
If anyone thinks he or she has the technical expertise to help solve the problem of resume play in BD-J discs, it would be more positive to take it up further directly with a BD-J insider than ranting here. This is what he said about it over there. He used to come to AVS but he now has a dedicated thread over there.
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post #14 of 20
12/1/08 at 3:20pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by demonfoo View Post

The problem isn't simply "remember[ing] the position the user was previously in"; due to the fact that the entire playback session is controlled by the BD-J code, the Java VM state would need to be saved along with it. If you just remember which title and what time offset, (a) you lose in-movie menus, and (b) when the title ends, you're in an unknown state; I suppose it could just dump back to the start of the disc, like it was just inserted, but apparently they decided that keeping consistent state and not dealing with the unknown state problem was preferable. (I can appreciate why they'd make that choice.)

I was perhaps speaking from the user perspective. As a user, I really don't care if there is Java in the player/disk or not as long as it works properly (which, IMHO, it does not).

From the engineering perspective, I understand that there is a Java VM running and something needs to be done to save/restore the state of the viewing. However, the state of the viewing is not necessarily as much data as the state of the Java VM with its stacks/storage/etc. The state is likely to be a fairly small number of variables indicating the choices the user made and how we got to where we are at. While this may vary from disk to disk, it is well defined, and probably not that much.

A simplification might be to forget about all of the Java stuff and just save how you are viewing the movie (where you are and what viewing settings you have) and get the user back to that place. I don't even need to write it down to remember. Just skip over the Java as quickly as possible and get me back to where I was at.


I think there is nothing wrong with ranting about some of these things, in fact it is helpful. The average consumer is going to be very upset with some of these issues with Blu-ray and it is high time that the BDA start listening to their knowledgable customers about some of these user interface issues.
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post #15 of 20
12/1/08 at 3:21pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kilian.ca View Post

If anyone thinks he or she has the technical expertise to help solve the problem of resume play in BD-J discs, it would be more positive to take it up further directly with a BD-J insider than ranting here.

Exactly. If it was such a simple problem to solve, I doubt it would have been left out so lightly.
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post #16 of 20
12/1/08 at 5:06pm
Thread Starter 
Kilian.ca

Excellent point. I do believe it would be fairly easy to solve this or provide a way to solve it. In fact, it's quite possible there IS a way, but responsibility is shifted onto disk publishers and complete set of features expected from a decent blue ray title has not fully emerged yet. As to expertise... I am an arrogant bastard so I'll say yes, I do have technical skills and general programming background to propose several potential solutions. But no, I have not read BD-J spec, I have not worked on BD nor do I have any interest in that area.
As most in this thread I was speaking purely as a consumer and as a consumer I can say that features such as this one cannot be left out. It's something people come to expect and it was available in the predecessor technology. Everything said beyond this is a pitiful excuse. Users should not need to care whether it's BD-J or BD-Perl or BD-C# or whatever the hell next standard they will come up with.


demonfoo,
it is an easy problem to solve, at least it was when original spec was being developed. Whether it's easy to add now is a good question I don't have an answer for. As to believing it's hard because it otherwise would've been solved... People screw up designs right and left and re-implement pitfalls that were closed long ago again and again. 99% of the time oroginal specifications are built by technologists that don't take minor details such as this one into account.

PS. Again, I'm talking out of my ... since I don't have any hands on knowledge of BD-J spec and at the moment don't have any interest in it since (same as with Java ME) it's useless unless you work with a publisher.
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post #17 of 20
12/2/08 at 1:34pm
I'll be getting a blue ray player for Christmas, don't have one now. When I watch a DVD, I end up going to the kitchen/bathrooom or whatever, and I stop the DVD. My question is can you stop and resume the blueray within a 10 minute break? If the answer is no, can you use the pause button and then resume play? Thanks

Semper Gumby
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post #18 of 20
12/2/08 at 4:15pm
Thread Starter 
Semper,
Use pause. This is what this thread is about- on some titles you will be able to stop and resume from the point you were watching, but not all. You would want to use pause anyway cause blue ray players take a loooong time to warm up/load info.
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post #19 of 20
12/2/08 at 4:24pm
Thanks for the answer.
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post #20 of 20
1/2/09 at 6:28am
How do I get the Interactive Field guide to display its tidbits of information?

I have the timeline showing at the bottom, the Interactive toggle says "ON", i can move the timeline bar to the icons that contain the information. I just cant get the actaul information to show on the screen. What button do I hit. If i hit pop-up menu it turn the interactive movie off.

I thought I was supposed to hit the red button but nothing happens.


Please help a newbie............
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