David Blizzard - Vintage Audio - Home Theater - Movie and Music Reviews » Blu-Ray

I Hate Blu-Ray

dblizzard — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:01:01 +0000

I can’t keep kidding myself and pretending it’s worth the hi-def movie experience. I really hate the Blue Ray platform. The entire approach is a setback for movie viewers. Don’t get me wrong, the picture quality is great. It’s the performance, I just can’t take it. Every time I put in a disc I ask myself why I didn’t just buy the cheaper DVD so I could start watching it as SOON as I put it in. We go from the spinning startup logo to the Distributor logo or custom progress bar loading forever to a black screen that usually means it is downloading 10MB of crap I don’t want and can’t imagine why it never asked me if I wanted it in the first place to, oh you thought that was it? Nope! Then I have to wait for the processor intensive animated menus. WTF! I just want to watch the movie. I skipped a step too, many times the stop or menu buttons are over-ridden too so I have to watch the previews. I had none of this interruption with DVDs. It reminds me of the performance issues with Windows Vista. Guess what Sony? Microsoft knew they failed with Vista and nothing could save it so they released a new OS rather than fixing Vista. I think Sony needs to do the same thing. Oh stop whining, I don’t really care about your existing Blu-Ray collection, get over it. It’s time Sony comes out with Beta-7. It will be a step in the right direction, even if it is tape. It can’t be any worse than Blue-Pray or Vista.

JVC XV-BP1 Blu-Ray Player

dblizzard — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:02:17 +0000

I read some great reviews about this BluRay player and I really wanted something that had a fast startup time and BD Live 2.0 so I put the JVC XV-BP1 on my Christmas list. My wife was feeling like Santa this year so she got it for me and I was like a kid in a candy store, or maybe a kid on Christmas day would be more appropriate. The first Blu-Ray movie I tried was The Mask with Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz. It played great and the load times were as advertised, I was excited. Then I played another movie and the audio didn’t work on pass-through. It only worked if I set it to PCM-Multi. So now I’m nervous, I did my homework, my Magnavox Blu-Ray was junk so I justified the JVC. Let me try something else, so I pop in John Mayer’s Where The Light Is – Live In Las Vegas… Still no audio on passthrough it only works on PCM setting.

So I start looking on the Internet for others having this problem and it comes up blank, no hits. This can’t be true, am I really the only one? Next I jump over to the JVC site and search for firmware and I see that my firmware is 6 months old. Apparently this thing has been in the warehouse for awhile. I download the newest firmware, put it on my flash drive, boot the player, it installs and BAM! it works. Man am I happy. If you have this same issue be sure your flash drive is formatted FAT not NTFS or it won’t work.

You can get the firmware update for the XV-BP1 Blue-Ray Player at JVC Firmware Update.

Heat on Blu-Ray in November 2009

dblizzard — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 01:05:02 +0000

Finally, it has been announced that Heat should be available on BluRay on November 3rd 2009. It’s about time! Now can we get Michael Mann back in the studio for Collateral on Blu-Ray? You can pre-order Heat on BluRay at Amazon.

Heat on Blu-Ray

Got a New Blu-Ray Player

dblizzard — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:10:36 +0000

My wife and 2 sons bought me a Blu-Ray player for my birthday. Sweet! I thought I would have to wait until Christmas. I got the new John Mayer concert, “Where The Light Is” and “The Punisher” both on Blu-Ray.

Update: Turned out even at a great price the Magnavox NB500MG9 Blu-Ray player was not up to the task. There were way too many discs from NetFlix that just wouldn’t play on it. We constantly had to use the Playstation to watch Blu-Ray discs from NetFlix. It was very slow but that would have been OK if it just worked.

I recommend the JVC XV-BP1 for features and performance. At current prices there is no reason to buy less. There are better, if you have the budget for it.