Official OPPO BDP-93 Owner's Thread - Page 633

I don't have time tonight, but I plan on downloading and installing the firmware again. Other than looking at the firmware revision and checking for a firmware update in the GUI, I don't know how to verify that the firmware actually installed.

I'll keep you guys posted. I'm glad that ISO's are still playing, but I'm not foolish enough to think I got all the updates w/o losing the ISO playback capability.

Looks like Oppo 93 is a perfect fit.
Now I need to find where to get the unit with the old firmware.
On ebay several old firmware units, but most of them have HW modified for multiregion.
I assume that modification does not affect PQ and other perfromance?

How about contacting OPPO service for help?

New Firmware fixes all my issues.
Oppo is the best.

* Great workaround for ISO:
Watch the dvds you made them from.

Really? Do you say that in all the other Oppo threads you post in?

Maybe we should just shut them all down and then Oppo can answer all of our questions. Who needs forums when customer service is there to lend us a hand?

I contacted Oppo customer service regarding Cinavia, here is their reply

Unfortunately all of my BD ISO's are "obtained" thru other channels so no disc to pop in.....too bad you dont utilize any of the features of the Oppo like streaming or connecting a HDD. You could've saved a few hundred bucks and just got a Pana or Sammy instead.

I did the new firmware update I must say that the 720 bug is fixed. a very big thanks to bob for letting us know about it and also getting oppo and the proper people to fix it.

thanks again.

Jacob

Ask OPPO if they are currently shipping players with the latest FW installed, or if they are shipping with a firmware upgrade CD included in the box. You could also buy from Magnolia AV from stock, or Amazon from stock. If you don't get what you want, just return the player in thirty days.

Mod for RF does not effect PQ or any other aspect of performance.

blairy

Next time someone asks about Cinavia, be sure to point them to this reply:-)

LOL, and some folks wonder why the studios want manufacturers to eliminate iso capability and anything resembling it. Did you really want to advertise what you do to everyone? All it does is make you look bad, and the rest of us who just want the ability to archive our collection and store them safely are made to suffer because of it.

I just got done archiving my Star Wars BD set and it occurred to me (as it did when I first opened it) that BDs that are packaged like these, in particular, are ideal candidates for archiving. I HATE the idea of any type of slipcover cases especially for BDs. One tiny speck of dust/dirt and the action of sliding the disc in or out of the slipcover can potentially scratch it. Scratch a disc slightly in just the wrong way and it could cease to continue playing glitch-free. Then again, maybe that was intentional. Lucas after all, IS the master of coercing people into rebuying the same product over and over and over again.

My favorite types of cases are the ones with the hinged center holder, where you push your finger down on the center and it pops and folds at the hinge leaving the disc free to be removed easily. To secure the disc back in the case, just place the hole over the center and push down gently at the edges of the hole in the disc and the center hinge pops back flat securing the disc. Some of the friction fit centers hold the disc so tightly, it flexes so much while trying to remove it that I worry that the disc might crack. Years of flexing the disc in this manner can, I'm sure, speed up the delamination of the data layer of the disc.

BTW, for the folks who DO archive their BD collections,
I use the iso feature simply because I know it creates a data image identical to the original and as mentioned, it allows for glitch-free 3D playback.

I haven't really looked into other options as yet though and was curious if there is anything akin to FLAC for music files as far as BD files go? i.e. something that is identically lossless with some compression advantages?

Many of my BD isos are 47-48GB in size, which means the 2TB limitation for drives connected to the Oppo can only hold on average, about 40 movies.

I'm not even close to having all my BDs archived as yet, but what do folks do when they have 500+ movies (or even anything upwards of 200 which requires more drive space than 4 2TB drives can hold in iso. form)? Keep adding drives with a hub? I think the largest hub I'v heard of someone having success with is an 8 USB port hub. In theory, this could hold somewhere between 320-350 HD movies.

Any other viable solutions out there that are capable of playing 3D BDs glitch-free without these hard drive limitations?


Max

Sorry to ask again.

Can somebody briefly explain what the "720p bug" was about? Was this mainly an issue with Netflix?

Thanks

The bug produced poor quality upscaling of all 720p content -- not just Netflix HD streams.

The precise nature of the problem is kind of hard to describe, but it primarily screwed up color upscaling rather than gray scale, so it wouldn't show up in typical scaling quality charts which focus on Luma instead of Chroma.
--Bob

As far as the studios are concerned, anyone who copies or publicly displays their discs, for whatever reason, is infringing copyright: they don't believe in Fair Use and have been trying to overturn that precedent. Since they haven't had much luck so far, they are going out of their way to make it as difficult as possible for someone to a) rip a disc and b) play it back in full quality.

For someone who is frowning on others infringing copyright, you seem to be advocating something similar for your own personal use, according to the studios. They frown on making backup copies of discs you own and, heaven forbid, reverse engineer or convert their property into a different form.

BD already uses high compression for audio and video: that's what VC-1/H264 and DTS-HD MA/TrueHD are for. FLAC is simply an open source equivalent to the commercial licensed DTS-HD MA and TrueHD lossless codecs.

The only way you can reduce the size of these already compressed discs is to re-encode the material with even greater compression or downscale the resolution.

The mkv copies of movies that you can find if you search are generally more highly compressed and/or 720p versions of the originals with DTS or AC3 audio. They may look okay on a 40" display, but they don't have the fine detail of the original and it probably shows on larger displays. Artifacts or greater softness and lack of detail are usually the result of going down this path.

Multiple soundtracks and extra features contribute to the size of an ISO, but not that many are the full 46GB: the exceptions are 3D which generally need all the space they can get. If you create a 2D movie-only version with only the soundtracks you want, the size can be reduced substantially in most cases without loss of original quality. Sacrificing lossless audio codecs for their lossy "cores" can also save space, whilst keeping the full original video quality. Even some ISO that appear to be 46GB may only be 30GB but are trickily authored to fill up the rest of the disc capacity with null data: to overcome this, simply rip to files and then convert back to ISO. At this stage, 3D titles can't be reduced in size without converting to a different 3D format.

There are a number of containers to use for movie-only copies, but the Oppo no longer supports ISO for those who have updated the firmware of their players and they don't support lossless audio in mkv.

Exactly.


The native format used for Bluray is already more or less equivalent to how FLAC works for music files - the data is already compressed (but it's lossy compression for the video vs. FLAC's lossless compression). The only way to compress it further is to re-encode it - either using more compression and intentionally throwing away more data or using a more efficient codec. But either way would result in at least a slight degradation in video quality because you aren't starting with the original lossless source - you'll never be able to get back an exact copy of what came off the original disk if you re-encode the data.


The Oppo has 2 USB ports, so (though it might be a bit unsightly to use the front port all the time) you could connect 2 8 port USB hubs and use 16 drives, plus another connected to the eSATA port. Not sure if this would work, and I don't think anyone has reported trying it, but it might be possible to cascade powered USB hubs to get more drives hooked up (I know it's technically possible to cascade USB hubs up to 5 levels deep in the general sense, I'm just not sure if this would work with the Oppo and I don't own multiple hubs to test this myself).


A HTPC can certainly do this, but then you obviously lose all the advantages of the Oppo.

Any chance on oppo adding VTuner? I would love this option!

I just updated my Oppo 93EU with the new firmware, which has the same changelog item as the US firmware

"4. Improved video up-conversion quality via the HDMI 1 output for 720p source material."

I tried a couple of 720p/24 files (downconverted Blu-ray rips, 23.976 fps), and my Samsung TV still shows a 1080p/24 input signal. According to the explanations in this thread, it should be 1080p/60, because of the new upscaling procedure.

Does anyone have the same phenomenon?

IanD and gsr,

Thanks for the replies and info. I guess it'll have to be a large array of drives at the moment then. I suppose when I get to that point, I'll see if cascading hubs is a viable option. Come to think of it, IIRC, the 2 options that folks have used are multiple drives with a hub, and multiple bare drives in a multi bay dock. Perhaps I could try that. Connect multiple docks via a hub. That in theory would allow 64 TB using 4-bay docks and an 8-port hub.

BTW, I also tend to believe in multiple redundancy (having lost work files due to a failing drive). Now I usually backup my data on separate drives used solely for that purpose. The backups tend to take up far less space than the data on the original drive, but seems to restore identically.

With what you folks have said about BD already being compressed, would it mean that using common backup methods wouldn't result in the backups taking up less drive space? Or that it could affect the quality? Or is it simply that there's a difference between playable compressed files like those in a BD vs compression that needs restoring (like zip files) before being usable?


Max

It's a big topic, endlessly debated on the forums specializing in such software. Try the Handbrake.fr forums or any other tool that is a frontend to x264, a popular encoder.

You can get impressive reductions in Blu-ray size, but (a) it is compute-intensive to produce, and (b) quality must be considered. There is no substitute for your own experiments. What I consider an acceptable (or even perfect) version of a video in my little viewing area may not work for someone sitting close to a huge screen.

-Bill

The compression used by backup software is ALWAYS lossless. So files that contain content that's already been compressed will take up pretty much the same amount of space they take on the live drive (unless the compression used in the original file was really inefficient) and when you restore a backup, the result is the exact file that was originally on the disc (just like extracting a file from a zip archive). For backing up your ripped movies, it would probably be pretty much just as efficient, space-wise, to just make a 2nd copy on another drive. Using backup software does have advantages though as it will automatically handle just backing up things that have changed since the previous backup was done. This is getting off topic for this thread though - I'm sure there are lots of discussions about backup methods in the HTPC forum.

Thanks for the added info guys. Now back to our regular scheduled programming.


Max

I have been able to connect up to 8 drives (4 on each usb port) but not any more. If I connect a 9th drive to the esata port it does not appear. The esata drive will appear if I only have 7 usb drives connected.
USB hubs with more than 4 ports do not seem to work.

Has anyone else been able to connect more than 8 drives?

If this is really needed, you should consider a media box like Dune, Popcorn, etc. Having support for network shares really opens up the possibilities, and management of those drives is also featured. Since there's no possible reason to need 8 drives accessible at once, also consider just keeping them in cases and swapping them into a dock when needed. Media boxes also support content management apps that really help keep track of all that stuff.

Interesting. Nothing else plays 3D iso files right? Perhaps I should consider a media box for the 2D stuff and only use the Oppo for 3D BD's via connected HDD.


Max

Have a Dune D1 but have not used it since I got the BDP-93 because of source direct and 4:2:2 colour space (for use with a Radiance VP).
I don't need to attach more drives at once, just curious I guess.

This seems to be contrary to the information here:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1359972

Planning on purchasing an Oppo 93 and connect it to a Rotel RSP-1069 which is only HDMI 1.1. Looking at the manual I would have it set to compatible to have the Oppo decode the Hi Rez audio and send it LPCM to the processor. That is no problem when playing blurays. What I want is to have the processor decode Dolby Digital and DTS on DVD's because the Rotel would do it better I understand. So how can I do this? Basically decode Blurays in the Oppo and bitstream DVD's to the Rotel, do I have two separate connections for that, hdmi for bluray and component and coaxial for DVD's? Would appreciate your help!