Official Panasonic DMP-BDT110/210/310 Owners Thread - Page 271

As promised, I did some disc load timing between my old DMP-BDT110 and my Sony BDP-S390 (a non-3D version of the S590 with a smaller enclosure, no external display and a single USB port but otherwise identical features). Starting a chapter from the main menu took a trivial amount of time for either, with the BDT110 being slightly faster, but it was like 3 seconds versus 4; in the noise. Disc startup times were a different matter. As I remembered, the Panasonic was always faster; depending on the disc it was a little faster or a lot. Timing from closing the drawer to the start of the front titles and credits (Harry Potter and Blade Runner) or to the menu being up and usable (T2 and Avatar):

• Terminator 2: S390 50 secs; BDT110 39 secs
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix: S390 68 secs; BDT110 60 secs
• Avatar (2D): S390 98 secs; BDT110 60 secs
• Blade Runner: The Final Cut: S390 80 secs; BDT110 69 secs

The Avatar disc required a persistent store to start without pausing to ask for one, so I used 4GB flash drive, freshly formatted for each. I timed the start-up of these discs 3 or 4 times each on either device. As you can see, the difference wasn't huge (8-11 seconds), except for Avatar.

I suppose that it's possible that the S590 is hugely faster but I doubt it.

My TV shows 1080/60p on the Sony home screen.

It takes about 1 sec to skip a chapter and displays a small tab on the lower left corner.

Just tested 2 BDs, sorry but I don't have much time these days:

Shawshank Redemption:
Sony - 49 secs, Panasonic - 43 secs

Speed:
Sony - 37 secs, Panasonic - 32 secs

The flimsiest part of the Sony is the remote. Such cheap plastic,especially the battery cover.
IMO it is not worth it for you to invest in a Sony Blu Ray Player if you already have a PS3.

Thanks Michael. I wonder if Netflix is having a hard time delivering today, since I also couldn't get decent throughput. Didn't test my cable connection, though. I look forward to your bandwidth test results.

Weirdness. I'm getting 230 MB received in my target window of minutes 5-14 of Ong Bak 2 when for the 3600 Kbps 720p encode I should be getting a little over 330 MB. I've tried it 3 times now with the same result. Then I set my PS3's display settings to restrict it to 720p and tried playing it and got precisely the result that I was expecting, 333.8 MB for those 10 minutes. Then I tried the BDT110 again and got the same strange result.

I'll play with it a little more tomorrow.

Thanks for the testing. I'm considering BDP-S490 or 590 and my current BD-players are PS3 and BDT110. I asked local Sony support about 490 and 590 and I was told they are the same except no WIFI in 490. I don't know if 390 is also the same.

When you clocked those movies you listed, did you have units already powered on? I try to understand where differencies in loading times come, is it from slow power up or slow drive. Also could it be that using flash drive (I assume you had BD-live and internet connection enabled in both units) makes difference? I use my BD-player without internet connection and no flash memory installed in my BDT110.

I saw one review of BDP-S590 where they tested Avatar 3D version and in was 64 seconds to FOX logo.
Edited by Big Lebowski - 9/17/12 at 2:40am

Have you enabled 24p? If not maybe that could explain the difference Sony not changing refresh rate so many times.

That sounds about the same as BDT110. This is also amazes me how in reviews they have such different results. For instance in CNET reviews they tested chapter skipping with certain title and 590 was able to skip chapters in 5 seconds while for instance BDT210 took over 25 seconds and BDT220 over 30 seconds to do the same. Is there really so much variation from unit to unit (or maybe production batches)?

Did you have units powered on or off when you started clocking?

I noticed that when I saw the Sony. The remote controller was much flimsier than one in Panasonic.
Does it work well (I mean do you have to point it very precisely or will it work from the angle as well)?

Problem is that my current PS3 is dying and I need a replacement. I'm trying to decide wether just buy another PS3 (slim this time) or a standalone player as I don't play games or use PS3 for anything else than play blu-rays.

While I agree that current sony players are very cheaply built, I'd rather spend my money on features than sheet metal. What difference could it possibly make to the functionality or longevity of the player if it's made of plastic or not? It's not like you can stack a lot of other components on it anyway. And the sony remote is no different than any other sony remote made in the past several years besides being smaller. The panasonic remote is made from the same kind of plastic. I seriously doubt you'd ever have any problems with either remote.

It's never taken me 25-30 seconds to skip chapters with my X10 or X20 player. They have reacted just as well as my Sony.

S~

It's a long time from the Fox logo to the menu. I was timing from pushing the button to close the drawer to the disc either starting to play automatically or getting to a menu where you could tell it to play--you know, from inserting the disc to a point where you can actually watch the movie.

I find that turning off networking and BD Live just causes problems with certain discs so I leave it on and give the player a flash drive or SD card. I rarely use BD-Live (only if someone tells me to check out a feature that they enjoyed). Avatar doesn't just want it for BD Live, but to store a bookmark on. If you've played the movie on your player at the point where it would have displayed the menu it will show a frame from where you left off and overlay a little dialog asking whether you want to continue from there or not. You can continue from where it asks for the memory without supplying it but it will still stop and ask, long before where it would have loaded the menu which sucks for timing. I think that the 2D Avatar disc was and is famous for being the slowest loading BD ever made .
Edited by michaeltscott - 9/17/12 at 12:11pm

I never use my PS3 for viewing video of any kind (even though the PS3 Amazon Instant Video player has the finest user interface I've ever seen on any piece of software for any purpose ). It burns about twenty times as much power in operation as one of these BD players (literally 100 times as much as my Roku 2) and its fan is loud enough to hear in the space where I use it (it's a 60GB launch model; if you have a Slim, you can halve the power usage and its fan might not be audible during BD playback, but still).

Okay--I give up. No matter what I do I still get that same result from the BDT110, which contradicts results that I got when the 1.88 firmware came out. If I plug the BDT220 into the same spot it seems to be sucking down the 4800 Kbps 1080p encode even when output is constrained to 720p, presumably downconverting 720p on output (previously I only saw that behavior from the TiVo Premiere). So both Panasonics are playing Netflix in unexpected ways; I'm just glad that I don't need to use the BDT110 for that purpose.

Panasonic DMP-BDT110 having trouble reading blu-rays

I'm trying to figure out why my blu-ray player will play dvds but won't read blu-rays. It tries to read it then says that there is an error. While trying to read the blu-ray the player makes a quite knocking sound. Have you heard of this happening before? Any ideas that could solve this problem?

THANKS!

Brad

Unfortunately, your symptoms are consistent with a failure in the disk reading mechanism. Blu-ray discs have a much tighter tolerance than DVDs. You'll have to get your player repaired or replaced.

@Michael: Just saw both your posts now. That is indeed odd.

Watching White Collar last night on our BDT 110, it was back to "normal", in the sense that we clearly got the 3600/720p stream. Even if they had enabled the 4800 stream (and hence that was what I saw lately) Netflix would be hard pressed to deliver it where I live: Everybody is watching Netflix, and just keeping a stable 3600 stream is a challenge. We usually see drops during movies, then we keep restarting playback until we get a better server.

Thanks for trying. Sorry it became such a hassle for you

Yes, 24p is enabled but it shows up only when playing 24p movie. In the other cases it stays on 60p - for example if I play an MKV file.

Yes, both powered on and measured from the time the eject button is pressed.

I don't like the way the remote works - buttons are too sensitive and sometimes triggered by accident. I've had the unit for about 4 months and with light use the right rubber arrow feels like getting stuck a little bit. Strange thing is that the play button is placed under the pause button. It works from most angles.

I have a BDT210 and it keeps flashing CALL on the front panel. I have updated the firmware and power cycled the device. It stayed off for a while, but it remains flashing intermittently. It also does this if I unplug the network cable; The wi-fi connection is disabled. Is this related to the Skype feature? I do not use this feature. I am wondering if there is some sort of short of the light is broken. Anyone have any ideas?

I was referring to this chart: http://b i t . l y /Hxl1GO (remove spaces from address)
It seems that Sony should be superior in chapter skipping compared to Panasonic but obviously it may not be so with all discs. I guess they test skipping discs from beginning to end chapter by chapter.

Thanks for you comments and testing. Have you by the way ever tried "Inglorious Bastards" blu-ray? That disc obviously is very demanding one also.

You are right about power consumption. While that does not make yearly more than few Dollars (or Euros where I live) total if you use it two hours a day I don't like that PS3 heats up everything else around it. Also during hot summer days it is annoying how much heat it puts and it is such a waste upping air conditioning to keep rooms not geting too hot.

I'm definitely interested getting a standalone player in case I could find one that matches the picture quality, durability and title support that of PS3.
Like someone said in this thread it does not matter much if player is made flimsy to how it works but I think flimsy units may not be so durable.

Very cool chart! Thank you very much for that. (Here's a direct link; this goes with it).

"Sunshine Chapter Skip" is the only place where the BDT220 falls on its face in re BD-playing performance in CNET's testing. Thankfully I don't play Sunshine often, or skip multiple chapters one at a time with the chapter-skip remote command (I don't think that I've seen the picture).

EDIT: I played with chapter skips using the T2 BD. Single chapter skips take about 2 seconds on the BDT220. What it doesn't do that other players probably do is count multiple skip buttons and go straight to the finally indicated chapter--it stops and displays frames from the beginning of some of the intervening ones. CNET's "Sunshine Chapter Skip" test starts playing chapter one and then presses chapter skip fourteen times to get to chapter 15.
Edited by michaeltscott - 9/18/12 at 2:48pm

And here is CNET's published charts for year 2011 players http:// b i t . l y /iV2pwX (remove spaces).

I have a bdt 210 that worked great with Netflix for the first month or so. For the last 3 months, no matter what I try to stream down, it will play a few minutes of the movie/show and then it will say it can't playback the video at this time. I've noticed several others on this forum experiencing the same problem. Has anyone found a solution? Firmware is up to date. Bandwidth is more than fine as I have zero problems streaming netflix through an xbox360. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I would guess the latest firmware introduced some problems. My issues are a little different. Netflix will load its UI but when I select a movie it will just spins its wheels until I turn it off in frustration (this does not happen all the time - just sometimes). I then turn on my WDTV Live and Netflix works flawlessly. Both devices are ethernet connected - no wifi. The 210 works fine with Hulu+ and Amazon.

I was going to suggest that you run Netflix's "Example Short 23.976". It has a text overlay which states which video encode that you're seeing. But I notice that I do not see that overlay when I play it on the BDT110. (I've tried it on everything else that I own with a Netlix player--TiVo Premiere, TiVo S3, PS3, Xbox 360, DMP-BDT220, Sony BDP-S390 and this PC and you can see that overlay on all of them except TiVo Series3, which is still using its original 4 y/o player and the non-adaptive-bit-rate video encodes.

This would suggest that they've switched the BDTx10s to using the other set of encodes. Someone in the Roku forums said that about 6 months ago they switched his last generation Roku XDS from 3600 Kbps 720p to 2600 Kbps HD. If the BDTx10s are now using that set of video encodes it would explain the results that I got in testing.

EDIT: I just tried running that example short on my Nexus 7 and even it has the bit-rate/resolutions overlays (never got up above the 1750 Kbps 480p encode, though--not something I'd use it for anyway).
Edited by michaeltscott - 9/22/12 at 6:09pm

Wow, thanks a lot Michael, I never knew about these example shows on Netflix. Been out all day and only just came back; haven't yet had a chance to try it on my BDT110. I did try it briefly on my PC though, and yes, it clearly cycles through the usual 1050, 1750, 2350, 3600 streams. I'll be very interested in seeing what it does on the Panny.

Warning to everyone: don't watch this show just before bedtime. The fountain scenes will have you going to the bathroom all night

There's been press about Netflix contracting some group with a revolutionary new encoding tech ("eyeIO") which achieves great results at lower bit rates (same or better quality at 20-50% lower). Maybe they're slowly phasing it in starting with the encodes for some of the older 720p-only devices? Although it didn't seem to start any faster, most of the time it seemed to start with higher quality encodes than most of the other devices.

Just tried a few of those Netflix Example shows now on my BDT110. Indeed, it doesn't display the stream info overlay like it did on PC -- just as you described. So yes, there are only two explanations: (1) The stream info is rendered by the player (like captions) and only on some players, such as the Windows Silverlight one; or (2) Netlix has brought new streams online which are pulled by some players, such as our Pannys.

I admit that the latter sounds more likely. And maybe they have indeed come up with some miraculous new codec that cuts bandwidth requirement -- which would be great news considering how hard it can be to receive stable high bitrate feeds. But why they would include those new encodes in the Example shows without the stream info is beyond me. I guess we'll learn if they decide to announce.

Of course one can hope this would mean higher res encodes becoming available on our players -- after all I never accepted the argument that these are inherently 720p devices, since the hardware has no such limitation and other VOD Apps (like Vudu) happily play 1080p. That said, a more efficient codec probably also demands more decoder CPU, which may limit what can be done with these players.

On an entirely different note: Although these Netflix Example shows are not the best quality source, they provide an excellent example of judder and why 24p VOD is desirable: Starting at about 2min is a panning scene with some of the worst judder I ever saw on the 23.976 example, and none on the 29.97 example (other than camera shake). This is on a 60Hz TV, of course, will be different in PAL land. As you and others have reported many times, the 2012 Panasonic players support 24 VOD, which, in combination with a 96/120/240 Hz TV, should eliminate that.

Thanks again for all the great info you provide

Update: Just found this old article about Netflix and eyeIO. Admittedly, I should have read that before posting. Apparently it's just a harder working H.264 encoder, with no changes in the decoder. I think that's what your post said as well. In that case there is no technical reason why this shouldn't permit 1080p streams on these players. But then, they would have (and could have) given us that long ago if they were so inclined.
Edited by Brandenborg - 9/23/12 at 12:22pm

There's a discussing going on about what people are seeing with that sample clip in the "Best possible Netflix streaming device" thread. I just added a post which shows graphs of what I'm seeing today on the BDT110 versus what I saw last time I tested on 8/23 (the new encoding has a 31% lower bit rate).

Just read up on that discussion over there. Excellent information, I'll be following that discussion.

Thanks - again!

DMP-BD10 please help !!

Ok this has prob been beat to death but i have a Panasonic DMP-BD10 dvd player and it plays reg dvds fine but wont play blu rays ... i have updated it to 2.5 .And when i did it stop playing blu rays .. is there a way to go back to 2.4 or any earlier version ..
any help would be great ..:D:D

I have been following this thread from the beginning, and I don't remember any mention of the BD10 (I could be wrong, though). Remember, this thread is about the 2011 players, whereas I believe the BD10 is 2006/07.

I'd suggest you suggest you search for threads containing "BD10 firmware". Amazing what search can do