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

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.

Magnavox BluRay Player Model NB500MG9

dblizzard — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 00:06:39 +0000

The Magnavox NB500MG9 BluRay player looked like a great deal and things were going good for a month or two. When I upgraded my Netflix account to 3 movies at a time I started getting a lot of Blu-Ray Discs and I started to see that the player had issues. Many times the movie would freeze or jump ahead. I could not rewind or forward to see what I missed so I would unplug the player and start over and it seemed that it would do this at exactly the same spot every time. I would clean the disk, try again and it just would not play. I would have to go upstairs and borrow the kids PS3 to finish watching the movie. The latest failure is the 15th Anniversary Resevoir Dogs on Blu-Ray, no audio or video, period. Fire up the PS3 and no problem.

By the way, Reservoir Dogs Blue-Ray is only $10 at Amazon right now.

Blu Blu Christmas

dblizzard — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 21:52:01 +0000

At the request of my wife I was updating my Christmas list and 2 of the first 3 movies I looked for are not out on BluRay yet. I was happy to see they released Man On Fire (Denzel Washington) but then I looked up Heat (Deniro, Pacino) and Collateral (Tom Cruise) and no luck. Still no Minority Report on Blu-Ray either, come on, is there really no demand, is everyone really buying Planet Earth and Kung-Fu Panda? I get the appeal and top ranking of movies like Ironman, it has something for everyone and Robert Downey Jr. has that special charisma that would have turned any 1950′s actor into a screen legend but some of these Blu Disk releases baffle me. Hollywood! I need action movies with a plot and actors that can, well, act and I need them in HD. I don’t need Crank or The Transporter, you should be ashamed.

No Minority Report on Blu-Ray?

dblizzard — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:24:24 +0000

I was looking for minority report on BluRay or HD-DVD and had no idea it wasn’t available until just now. What a bummer. I can get Rio Bravo on Blu-Ray or Christmas Vacation on HDDVD but not minority Report?
Don’t get me wrong, I like both of those movies but there is no reason for an old grainy western like Rio Bravo to be out on HD before Minority Report and Christmas Vacation has a choice of stereo or mono track on HD. Give me a break Hollywood.

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.

Death to HD-DVD

dblizzard — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:19:35 +0000

They did it, they killed HD-DVD. I didn’t get to open and watch every one of the HDDVD movies I got for Christmas and it’s already obsolete. Toshiba officially announced that they give up. I guess I’ll be getting a Blu-Ray player before the end of the year. It stinks being on the losing team