Official Sony BDP-S590 and BDP-390 Thread - Page 7

thanks,


does this cinavia affect only US players?
does it affect only bluray discs or files also?

i create my mkv's using 'pavtube bytecopy' from original blurays, would these be affected?

I replaced it with the same player last night. The faulty one had the latest firmware.

The replacement seems to be working fine after popping in a few disks. I think it was just a bad drive.

Thanks for reminding us that HDMI has been broken.

All of the DRM associated with Blu-ray has been broken, and broken in such a way that it is only mildly inconvenient to do it. Not even rocket science, just requires a little googling.

Once again, the old axiom has been verified: DRM hurts honest consumers but doesn't affect serious pirates.

So we have people scraping perfectly good component-only HDTV's for no good reason at all.

Well, at the end of the day, Cinavia will be on everything and you won't be able to avoid it - otherwise, newer BDs will fail to play at all without running the latest firmware (remember when Avatar came out?).

How this movie ends (pun intended) is we stop using BD players as streamers and move to one of many HDD-based, low-cost boxes from Taiwan running Linux and some open source media playback software with an adaptation of XBMC as the user interface. Then you will be able to play whatever video you have without difficulty.

Hard drives keep getting bigger and cheaper, so the size of 1080p videos won't matter, unless everyone moves to 4K video, in which case you will need a SAN to store your movie collection.

They don't expect any of this stuff to deter serious piracy. It's all for the purpose of "keeping honest people honest". I've seen this writ large many times in white papers. They don't want you to have the ability to rip "back up" copies of discs that you buy.

This is probably true. I'd say that the commercial streamers like Boxee and WD TV Live would always be safe from this but someone will just slip Cinavia detection on all played content into the licensing requirements for one or more of the DRM systems used by the streaming content providers.

Ordered the S590 from Amazon on March 18 as a pre-order and just received an email from them this morning stating that my unit would be shipping sometime between April 16 and April 25. A bit longer than I anticipated, but it gives me plenty of time to peruse this thread to decide if I made the right choice. Already have the PS3 and an Oppo BDP-83. Was going to get an Oppo BDP-93, but since this new unit will probably end-up in the bedroom eventually, I'll wait until I upgrade my main system before I get another high-end Blu-ray player. Never know what Oppo (or some other manufacturer) will come up with in the meantime.

- da Choge

Agreed. Of course they do not have to roll anything out to older players. There is no indication if older players can even handle constantly scanning audio tracks on a title looking for whatever it is they stuff into the audio track.

I also have no intentions of using a blu-ray player for streaming since my TV can handle that if I want, and if a title requires me to install cinavia infected firmware, I plan to pass on that title. I already avoid purchasing most cinavia infected titles and mostly rent them only. Needless to say, I also have no plans to purchase a new player either (I have 3 players, I expect I am good to go for quite some time).

Well, I got my S390 this afternoon (surprisingly the UPS guy turned up with it at 3:30--usually they don't show up with things I'm eagerly awaiting until around 7 PM ). I checked out the three streaming players that I care about and BD playback and everything seems decent and as expected: Netflix with 1080p/CC/bitstreamed DD+ 5.1 with a PS3-like info overlay activated with the DISPLAY button (I love that), VUDU with bitstreamed DD+ 5.1 and Amazon with bitstreamed DD 5.1. The Amazon player GUI is pretty sucky and its playback start time is probably the slowest I've experienced. It's bearable, but hopefully it'll get updated in the future. The Netflix GUI is much more responsive than the BDT220's, though it does lag behind in updating the title info pane (the PS3 player doesn't but it can't bitstream Netflix DD+).

One deficiency versus the BDT220 is the lack of an SD card slot, though I suppose if I just had to use an SD card I could use a USB reader, but not simultaneously with using a USB flash or HDD drive. I'll have to find another use for the one in my BDT220. I'm wondering if you can store both BD Live content and other media files on a USB drive. I'll try it and see. The dual USB connections on the BDP-S590 are beginning to seem much more interesting.

I noticed that I had to change one of the default settings to get bitstreamed audio from BD: "Setup->Audio Settings->BD Audio MIX Settings" is ON by default and has to be set to OFF or it will render audio into multichannel LPCM so that it can mix BD interactive audio content into it. (I've always disliked the XMB on the PS3 but I find that I like it a ton more than the Panasonic BD player menus; it's frickin' wonderful by comparison ).

I bought a 16GB version of that flat little USB drives that you hyped back here (thanks) briefly tried to liberate it from it's ridiculous hermetically sealed package and gave up (it's like they're trying to make it difficult to return a defective unit by forcing you to mangle the package beyond all recognition ). Time to get back to digging it out .

Guys, can you look into this. I read this review as well, apparently this guy claims that all disney blurays will not playback on this player. So the guy made a call to Sony and they said that the player has very little memory and that he needs to use a flash drive plugged into the usb port to give the system the memory it needs.

Once he did that, he had success with playback. Is this is a more common trend we can expect with bd players? Manufacturers cutting costs by not implementing proper memory into their players?

I don't mind buying a $10 flash drive with 4 gigs of space, but I'm twiddling my thumbs wondering if I should purchase this player or wait for something more capable. The BDT 220 from Panny, that required a 1 gig sd card for bd-live playback too right? Are they are all getting to be like this?

But even more important, will it playback all blurays properly with the flash drive?

Tricky question. They're forcing the consumer to pay for memory, but also offering additional flexibility in file playback with usb and sd card slots.

FYI, I've tried 3 different usb flash drives without success on a panasonic 2011 blu ray player.

Panasonic players has always used memory cards.USB flash drives are use on the Sony's.

At least Sony isn't forcing us to use their proprietary memory stick.

Somewhat ignorant question, but regarding bitstream audio from BD, is this the preferred method? Does this then send the 1/0's to the A/V receiver to determine the audio output?

I just set up my player last night as well as a new Onkyo 709 receiver and JVC RS40 projector so, to say the least, am hookup and configuration overwhelmed. This is a big shift from my previous setup (first time into BluRay, etc). Everything's working fine, but I'm early in the learning curve on what's actually doing the audio/video processing, etc. I did struggle during my test last night with Dark Night BluRay with DolbyHD and could not get that as an option on my Onkyo for playback which it does support.

Any recommendations/suggestions for this full new setup would be appreciated or any links. Trust me, I've been all over AVS forums, but it gets pretty overwhelming with all the new equipment I have to figure out.

Thanks.

Another thing to be aware of: you need to send bitstream and not LPCM. The Sony players cannot decode the DTS-HD to LPCM and will, instead, use the core lossy dts track (i.e. 1.5 Mbps).

Why do you care about this? Because few AVRs can both decode the HD bitstream *and* apply processing for enhanced surround modes (e.g. Yamaha's Cinema DSP). You have to go to the high-end in AVRs to avoid this problem (or buy a better BD player - the Oppo and Denon models, for example).

Frankly, in my ad-hoc listening tests, I can quickly discern the lower bit rate Dolby AC-3 (DD 5.1) from dts (core 5.1) - the 1.5Mbps dts sounds noticeably better than the 448 kbps AC-3. However, going from 1.5 Mbps core dts to the roughly 4Mbps dts-HD - I really can't tell the difference with a typical movie soundtrack.

My guess is that most others can't either, hence: the BD mix setting is on by default to avoid the technical support call from a customer wondering why they can't hear the commentary on the 'special edition' version of their favorite movie.

We have watched a multitude of Disney/Pixar movies on my s390 and I have no USB installed, nor have I encountered any issues or requests to stick in a USB. I have the most recent firmware installed.

The following is a list of all the moves I can confirm we have watched with absolutely no issues:

Blu-Ray:
Lion King
Beauty and the Beast
Toy Story 1-3
Tangled
Wall-E
Cars
Bug's Life

DVD
Finding Nemo
Monsters Inc
Sleeping Beauty
Incredibles
Pinocchio

Your proof of this is your ear or is there some documentation?

Thanks for the feedback guys, I wonder if this guy got a defective player? I guess we'll see how this playback problem pans out as more people buy this player and test it out.

I don't think so. Any modern BD player will decode DTS-HD to PCM and send full HD audio.