Poll: Are your new James Bond Blu-ray Discs acting up?
By Darren Murph 
posted Nov 3rd 2008 3:37PM
posted Nov 3rd 2008 3:37PM
[Via CDFreaks, thanks Anthony]
posted Nov 3rd 2008 3:37PM
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Bond discs are just fine...it's the new Matrix discs that won't play with my player's latest firmware! They load the Java apps, then just sit there and I have to unplug and reboot! The extras discs play fine; only the feature films won't play.
I just want all movies in Blu, in a special box, and that works in All Blu players.
@squiggle
How many HD DVD manufacturers were there again?
HD DVD was easier, I'll agree. Some of the issues have been replication, but most are authoring, and most are from Fox. I would put more blame on Fox than anything.
Now on the HD DVDs not playing, I could post several links, but they don't want links here. There were problems, just not as many.
That was supposed to go below.
This is complete BS that after a number of years in the market, they still can't get their crap together. No wonder the adoption rate is so poor. BDA would probably go down in history as the organization that rushed the demise of HD content on disc.
You can "lowest rated" me all you want. But, all these DRM and profile 2.x crap is really not helping much. Even though I have a PS3, I've already stopped buying Blu-ray discs. I'm done feeding this erratic monster.
Couldn't agree with you more. Greediness on the part of the studios, both through DRM and overpricing the movies, will insure that Blu never really succeeds.
The BDA didn't make these discs, MGM Home Entertainment did. They should be getting the slap on the wrist for not performing adequate quality control on their discs before releasing them. How hard is it to stick a disc into a dozen or so players and run through a checklist of tests to make sure it works anyway?
The BDA certainly needs to be more proactive in enforcing compliance to the standard not just in software but in hardware. Most of the glitches that have occurred seem to have been easily avoidable with a little more testing.
DrXym MGM Home Entertainment is a Sony label, so it is Sony's fault, these things were probably rushed into development and release at the spurning of Sony, probably due to the ever increasing costs of running MGM and likely hood that if anything from SPS was to be cut loose it would be MGM.
Is MGM owned by Sony? It's very hard to untangle its history from the Wiki pages. It appears to be owned by a consortium which includes Sony. On top of that MGM HE content appears to be distributed by 20th Century Fox. At the end of the day its day to day folks in MGM that deserve a slap on the wrist for this.
Remind me, how many HD DVD releases had major problems on a substantial cross section of players?
Oh, none of them? One or two had minor problems, but nothing serious like we've had with the Bond discs? Or Iron Man? Or Fantastic Four 2? Or... well {insert big list here}?
But yeah, Warner was so right ditching the working format for the work-in-progress don't-know-what-we're-doing stupid-DRM-scheme-encumbered piece of junk whose only advantage was higher capacity per layer?
Urgh. Tell you something: even if they fix the sodding format, even if they remove BD+, implement a proper online framework, provide a means to press unencrypted discs, and drop player prices to $50, I'm still not buying this junk format until I've seen a couple of years go by without problems.
HDi > BD Java.
Too bad the broken model won.
HDDVD had its problems. Everytime I popped in a disc with Internet connectivity, it always got stuck on the loading screen. I always had to reset the player and cancel the online connection before it could connect. Think Transformers. At least when I rented Sleeping Beauty to try the BDLive stuff, it worked right away on my PS3.
Along the lines of misbehaving blu-rays discs, I sport a Sony BDP-300 at home, with the latest firmware update (Version 4.20) and BARAKA will not play. Brought it back to BEst Buy and it played no prob on the $800 denon in the showroom. What gives?
I posted a tip last week but nothing got posted. There are playback problems with the following players:
Samsung 1200, 1500 and 5000 (For Your Eyes Only)
LG 100 and 200 (For Your Eyes Only)
Sony BDP1, 300, and 500 (All of them)
Pioneer 51, and 05 (For Your Eyes Only)
Sharp 20 (For Your Eyes Only)
Possibly others.
This mainly affects For Your Eyes Only. Not sure what the deal is with the Sony players but for FYEO, someone on AVS said they heard from an insider that it's an authoring error which resulted in a corrupt file. Some players ignore it, others like those listed above just freeze. Fox customer service is taking down information, but they haven't agreed to replace any discs yet. For now it looks like it's up to the manufacturer to create a workaround to allow a defective disc to play.
Samsung 1000--Won't play "For Your Eyes Only" but will play the other two
Samsung 1200--Won't play ANY
Have the latest firmware (June of '08). Any word on a Fix????
I bought all 6 on ebay for $120 to take advantage of a 10%($12) coupon + 25%($30) cash back from MS, and then add in 6 free movie tickets ($9.50 here x 6 = $57) and $18 ($3 each movie) at the concession stand as well. The movies were practically free. I'll end up paying about $30 though after I give a discount on the tickets to my friends.
I've only watched my favorite Bond movie of the six From Russia with Love on my PS3 and I had no problems.
FYEO is broken on every BD-P1500 in existence. This isn't a spotty issue where it works on some and not others. It is widespread and total.
The fact that the same title is broken on a number of other players points to an authoring issue with the disc.
Let me re-iterate. The above list of players where FYEO is broken encompasses ALL of the players of that model unless the manufacturer has issued a new firmware to specifically address this issue. This isn't "works on mine but not on yours" issue, it's a "broken on all" issue.
Did DVD have this many glitches this far into it's lifespan? This is getting ridiculous.
DVDs primary issue still is around today, it is a flaw in the printing process. DVD Forum set out standards that all players and movies had to follow when it came to formatting so the playback issues were few and far between by players certified to carry the DVD trade mark.
Some DVD disks with issues are listed here:
http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#1.41
BD is obviously a far more complex standard and there is far more scope for error. The answer of course is proper testing and quality control. If studios or production houses can't do it, they should pay somebody that specialises in it.
HD DVD didn't have these problems much earlier in its lifespan.
The Decision for BDA to choose Java was a mistake. Can they release an HDi compatible profile 2.1 or something this late in the game?
When DVD's came out, the industry was pretty immature in terms of security.
Now with Blu-ray, the major players don't want to loose as much money as they did with DVD's.
They know that if they want greater sales numbers, they either have to make the format very secure or lower the prices to a resonable level.
I guess they choose/attempted the latter :(
With DVD, initially they made some attempts at better security, but soon discovered that it's pointless. (hackers/crackers will always figure-it-out)
"the most creative minds don't work for the big guys" :)
Eventually they just lowered their prices for DVD's, over time.
With Blu-ray, they've decided that they're willing to piss-off their entire install base by releasing a new version of the hardware (Blu-ray 2.0).
Unreal. I picked up Die Another Day and had no issues with PS3. But I am not suprised to hear about these issues. As for the Matrix, I have never had 1 issue playing it, on my HD-DVD player since I got the HD-DVD version a year ago.
Sorry had to throw that out there.
HD DVD FTW?
HD DVD had glitches too. Some Universal content had to be recalled because it wouldn't play properly with the 360 add-on. The issue of course is that complex standards, especially those independently implemented by multiple vendors need adequate testing to ensure compliance and compatibility. Shoving a disc out there and hoping for the best just doesn't cut it any more.
yeah I was just kidding. Every time there is a BD issue (which seems frequent) people come in praising HD DVD.
Both players are slow, buggy, expensive, and obsolete. At least they upconvert :)
The only problem that I had was that I had to update PowerDVD 8 to the latest build.
All the movies have played fine on the PS3 without any intervention on my part.
I wanted to comment that MGM is actually owned by Fox Studios, not Sony. I would certainly think that Sony would have their act together with quality control by now, but it seems like Fox still has major issues to work through.
Saying that, I must say that the PS3 is a tank and played all my Bonds fine.
Sony actually does own a large chunk of MGM and controls with other partners. Fox did distrubition for these titles though, and I believe they now do all the distrubition for MGM titles that are not coproduced with Columbia Tri-Star.
Works fine on my PS3.
The PS3 is part of the problem though. You have a player that's basically 100% software written for a platform that's so overkill hardware-wise for blu-ray playback that the devs have all they could ever ask for as far as resources go. When you have more than enough resources, you can write very robust software with tons of exception handling.
Contrast that to the embedded platforms that standalones use. Every little bit of CPU and memory usage counts. Code is optimized to hell and back and resources are very limited. This is where very tight specs matter. There's no point in wasting a chunk of memory for an exception that should never happen because the specs say it shouldn't, so that's not coded. Only, in this case, the specs aren't so tight and the authoring and manufacturing process doesn't have very robust QA either. This is exasperated by the fact that PS3 is best selling blu-ray platform so lazy QA will just test against it.
All 6 of these discs were a disaster when first released. At the time, my Sony BDP S300 had been updated to to the latest firmware (4.2) and the only way I could get any of the 6 discs to play was to do a little voodoo ritual where I reset the machine and started the movie using the chapter selections instead of the normal play option. And after the movie finished you couldn't watch it agin or watch another of the movies until you did the whole reset dance again. Try to access any of the special features and the whole thing would lock up.
Luckily Sony released firmware 4.3 last Friday and all is well now but I gotta say this kind of crap should not be happening two years into the life of Blu-ray. I don't care if its MGM's fault or the BDA or Sony or whatever. Its just an ugly black eye on Blu-ray as a format.
squiggleslash Said:"Remind me, how many HD DVD releases had major problems on a substantial cross section of players?"
Cross section of Players? Wasn't there only ONE producer of players Toshiba?
For years Apple had that advantage in computing till the whole plug and play thing really got dialed in, if you are the only one producing something, it's pretty easy to keep it standardized.
You're right. LG and Microsoft and Samsung were making, er, CD players or something. Yeah, that's it. They can't have been making HD DVD players because, like, HD DVD was only made by Toshiba and wasn't a DVD Forum developed standard supporterd by a number of manufacturers.
Woking well in a PS3 with the lastest firmware.
I'm hurt, no one wants all the bond movies???
anyways, I just want one (sane) (even Ben or Darren will do) person explain to me the real reason why HD-DVD lost to Blu??? Thats all I want to know. Don't say studio support, because that was the reason, but why they went that way is what i want to know. Conspiracy theories and all.
Cause if I get this straight, HDDVD was farther along than Blu, it had the benefits of being called HD (I'll explain that if asked), had Combo dvd's, live was already integrated, seemed cheaper, and I did not have any problems on any HDDVD movie which includes Matrix, Transformers, Spy Game, 300, and more.
Its pretty simple Fred. It was actually studio support. ...in the end.
When all is done and said, Sony Pictures would very likely have been blu-ray exclusive forever. There's a chance it might have gone hd-dvd if hd-dvd was a run-away success like DVD was, but, maybe not. So 100% studio support was never really a great likelihood for hd-dvd.
Granted, hd-dvd won in technical merrits but alas movies make a movie playing hardware worth while eh?
In the end, Warner Brothers switched from hd-dvd to blu-ray. This was one of their last-exclusive studios with movies like Batman Begins keeping hd-dvd strong.
For whatever reason, the executives one day decided to jump ship? Perhaps they felt mass adoption would occur quicker if they sided with the more expensive layer with more expensive discs? Bribes/kickbacks? Who knows what happened behind closed doors.
All that matter in the end of the day was HD-dvd lost studio support form their biggest backer, slowly one-by-one other backers jumped ship. Within about a month, hd-dvd called it quits. You can't sell movie playing hardware without movies to be played. :|
I really think that Warner Brother's really screwed the consumer by supporting Blu-ray but I'm biast cause I was pro hd-dvd. In the end, hd-dvd lost, blu-ray won. Studio support decided it.
My blu-ray copy of For Your Eyes Only will not play on my Pioneer BDP-05. I called Pioneer and they sent me a firmware update(version 1.08) that was thought fix the issue. I loaded the upate and I still cannot play the disc. I'm seriously regretting making the blu-ray jump for two reasos: 1) the cost of the player itself and 2) it would appear that you may have continued issues with blu-ray discs as continuos updates may be required to play the discs. Kind of a strong argument to stick with DVD formats. Blu-Ray audio is nice, but not with these potential recurring problems.
Apparently quite a few people are having issues, particularly with the bond discs. Anyone getting them solved or money back?????
I think the problem has to do with the gay bit Daniel Craig wants inserted into all Bond Blu-ray movies. That extra bit throws off the whole evolutionary cycle.
Regarding Daniel Craig:
The heart-throb actor has also reportedly told studio chiefs he is prepared to film a full frontal nude scene to please both his male and female admirers. He says, "Why not? I think in this day and age, fans would have accepted it. "I mean, look at (British TV series) DOCTOR WHO - that has had gay scenes in it and no one blinks an eye."
What's next a pedophile scene?
ibwhynotfanswouldacceptit
WTF!?
A nude man briefly shown from the front is "gay" is it?!
Your masculinity must be so fragile, poor thing.