My dream optical-media player: It is small, light, and durable. It has one tray for five-inch optical disks. It has two HDMI outputs for running one to the audio receiver and one to the video output. All of the major operation buttons are located on the front panel with all of the advanced-feature buttons on the remote control. It does not have wifi. It does not support Netflix, Amazon prime, or any other such streaming service. It is merely a transport for optical disks. The primary media input is a tray holding one five-inch optical disk. There is also USB for media files. The LAN is for upgrading the firmware after the media industry becomes even more insane and once again changes the keys for Blu-ray and also for obtaining subtitle files offline when included subtitles are inadequate. It perfectly plays: CD, CD-R, CD-RW, etc., CD-V, VCD, SACD, HD-CD, etc., all regions of DVD Video and DVD Audio, DVD-R, etc., HD-DVD, CHBD (China blue), all regions of Blu-ray and Blu-ray audio. Simply insert any five-inch optical disk coded for audio or video media, and it plays that media perfectly. It can also allow navigation of files and folders and can play audio or video of any significant media format and can play iso files and other similar files as though they are physical disks. It skips over warnings, commercials, and disclaimers directly to playing the main feature. The HDMI outputs will simply stream whatever audio or video is on any disk in its native resolution and format (PAL or NTSC) up to a maximum of 24 bits/192Khz per channel. Basically, I want a transport in which one inserts any five-inch disk, the player reads it, figures out what it is, and plays it properly, regardless of the format or country of origin. Also, simultaneous display of as many different languages of subtitles as desired is enabled. There is nothing absurd or impossible about this. I used to own a DVD player which had most of these capabilities. Unfortunately, it broke, and no replacement appears to be available. However, such a simple device is made out to be absurd or impossible because of the industry itself, which desperately wants to ensure that there is no such convenient solution to media playback. The technology is actually intentionally engineered in order to prevent people from fully utilizing it, which is actually encouraging to piracy. I can only speak for myself about what I want from a media transport. When I watch a movie, I have no interest in seeing legal notices and disclaimers. I do not want to sit through commercials. What I definitely do not want to sit through are clever menu animations which contain spoilers. They are a waste of my time and sometimes reveal information that would have better been left as a surprise. The pirates agree. Pirates skip this stuff, too. They just want to watch movies. 20th Century Fox media is the most irritating because it obliges the consumer to sit through the Fox Fanfare, once before getting to the main menu and then almost immediately again at the start of the feature. I love the Fox Fanfare, but I want to hear it once and only once, immediately at the start of the movie, not before I get to the main menu. Consumers should never have been tolerant of region coding in the first place, and the practice should be challenged internationally as undue restriction of fair trade. A Japanese Blu-ray in an American Blu-ray player will not play. This is not malfunction. It is intentional mal-design. Disks are likewise mal-coded. I own the first two Deathnote movies on DVD. My wife and I cannot enjoy them together. The films are in Japanese. In order for me to obtain a version with English subtitles, it was necessary for me to have region-1 disks shipped to my home in Korea. The region-1 disks contain only English subtitles. For Korean subtitles, region-3 disks must be obtained. Thus, any student of Japanese who might want to study the language using Japanese language in combination with Japanese subtitles would actually need to acquire a region-2 version with no capacity to switch subtitles without physically swapping disks (an also needing a region-2 player). Even if English, Korean, and Japanese subtitles were placed on the same DVD, the technology is generally hardcoded to allow display of only one language at a time. If it were not for the fact that multi-region players are readily available here, the industry would expect me to purchase a region-1 DVD player in the US, have it shipped across the planet, and leave me to figure out how to get the 110-volt/60hz power supply to operate here at 220-volt/60hz. This is all utter nonsense because it would have been easier and less expensive to develop and implement the technology for there to have been no regions in the first place. In fact, the world at one point had just started to get a region-free HD media in the form of HD-DVD when Sony bribed Toshiba a ludicrous amount of money to suppress its patents on HD-DVD. This left us stuck with Blu-ray and Sony trying to recoup its losses on the buyout of Toshiba by keeping prices of players and disks high, not to mention the absurdity of maintaining three regions worldwide along with anti-piracy coding that requires all Blu-ray players to be network compatible so that their firmware can be regularly updated in order to allow them to continue to play new media. The actual fact of the matter is that none of the safeguards in place are preventing piracy. The worst part of what is happening is that consumers are being alienated from purchasing legitimate products because the hardware and media alike are user unfriendly.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 10:04:38 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015