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Raising your profile: what you need to know about profiles before you buy a Blu-ray player

Thomas Bartlett- 06/05/2008 11:00:43

Blu-ray was not as good as its rival when HD DVD's backers pulled the plug on the format, but it soon will be.

Just think about it for a moment. It is 2006 and you have spent many hundreds of millions of yen developing a fine home entertainment technology. So have your rivals. There are minor differences between the two, and neither is compatible with the other. They are about to release theirs onto the market.

But their technology is, in some ways, even more developed that yours. Oh, your technology will be able to do everything theirs can, but it just needs a bit more time to have the necessary processing chips developed.

The problem is, if they come to market significantly before you do, they will gain dominance and the game is up for you. So what do you do?

You release a product in which the more advanced features are not yet available. So it was with Blu-ray.

It's ironic then that, despite its demise in January this year, HD DVD was the more full implemented, feature-rich of the two high definition formats. In fact, if you have a HD DVD player, it can do things that cannot be done by any existing Blu-ray player, except the Sony Playstation 3.

HD DVD is dead

HD DVD, though, is dead. Its principal developer, Toshiba, announced in February 2008 that it would no longer be developing the technology. The movie studios that had adhered to the HD DVD creed (and in at least one case, abandoned its former position of agnosticism) soon announced they would be switching over to Blu-ray. So HD DVD has gone. When your HD DVD player dies, as it must eventually, your HD DVDs will be unplayable.

Nonetheless, HD DVD gives us insights into what is promised by Blu-ray when its development is finally complete.

The three stages

The core functions of Blu-ray were there from the start. All Blu-ray players have been capable of handling all three of the video formats available on Blu-ray discs. All have been capable of handling to some degree all of the seven (!) audio formats available on Blu-ray. All have been capable of handling the BD-JAVA programming language in which some special features have been implemented. Maybe not out of the box, but via later firmware upgrades.

However Blu-ray players released before the end of October 2007 fell into an explicitly titled 'Grace Period'. The Blu-ray Disc Association, which controls the licensing of the technology for players, recognised that certain intended Blu-ray features would not be available in time to compete with HD DVD. So those early players conform to the first stage of Blu-ray specifications, the so-called 'BD-Video 1.0 (Profile 1) Grace Period'.

All players released from November 2007 onwards must comply, under the Blu-ray Disc Association's licensing rules, with the next stage, confusingly called 'BD-Video 1.0 (Profile 1) Final Standard Profile'. This is also informally known as BD-Video 1.1 or BonusView.

In other words, the grace period in which products with incomplete capabilities could be released, has now come to an end. Having said that, the 1 November 2007 date applies to the release of new products, not the continued sale of old ones. Most Blu-ray players available in Australia as this goes to press are still 'Grace Period' models.

It would be a good idea, if you are planning on purchasing a Blu-ray player, to confirm that the models you are considering are 'Final Standard Profile' models. That is because the movie studios are about to release Blu-ray discs with special features that use the capabilities provided in Final Standard Profile, but not Grace Period, Blu-ray players.

In a moment we will see what these features are, but before we do I should briefly mention the third stage of Blu-ray development, called 'BD-Live (Profile 2)'. This will offer more features still, including internet connectivity, but it seems to be optional. In other words, BD-Video 1.0 (Profile 1) Final Standard Profile/BD-Video 1.1/BonusView will be the standard, while BD-Live (Profile 2) will offer a bit more on top.

Page 1 of 4  Next - What you get in Blu-ray stage 1: Grace Period  

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In this article

• Raising your profile: what you need to know about profiles before you buy a Blu-ray player
• What you get in Blu-ray stage 1: Grace Period
• What you get in Blu-ray stage 2: Final Standard Profile
• What you get in Blu-ray stage 3: BD-Live