by: Eli Ungar-Sargon

I’m not very good at waiting for new technologies. In marketing lingo, I am the classic early adopter. So the fact that I have waited this long to jump on to the Blu-Ray train is somewhat out-of-character for me. A large part of why I held off has to do with the dreadful format war that was waged in 2007 between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Like many consumers, I thought it unwise to start buying into a format that may or may not survive. I also had other, more convenient ways of getting HD content into my life via Comcast and eventually Apple T.V..

When the format war finally came to an end in January of 2008, Blu-Ray was the victor. But the players were still expensive and the selection less than stellar. Fast forward two years, and the price of Blu-ray players has come down significantly while the library has grown to a respectable 2,500 titles. Having now spent a good month exploring the world of Blu-ray this is what I’ve learned.

The Technology

While a Blu-Ray disc (BD) looks very much like a DVD, under the surface there are some important differences. A BD holds up to 50GB of data on the same space that it takes a DVD to store 9 GB of data. Blu-ray accomplishes this feat by having smaller pits and lands (the physical representations of 1’s and 0’s that all laser-based media employ) and using a 405 nm blue-violet laser as opposed to the 650 nm red laser of DVD’s.

The higher capacity of the format allows BD’s to store a much higher resolution image and higher fidelity sound than traditional DVD’s. While a DVD can show a maximum of 720 horizontal pixels by 480 verticle pixels, a BD can display an image of 1920 by 1080, or “full HD.” And while DVD’s can provide 5.1 surround sound, each of these channels must be encoded as a compressed mp3 file. BD’s have enough room to store a full 7.1 channels of uncompressed sound.

The Experience

Without a doubt, Blu-Ray currently provides the best home theatre experience available. The quality of the image is noticeably better than any of the HD content you can get from a cable or sattelite provider and if you look closely, it is even better than the HD content available from Netflix, Amazon, and Apple T.V.. This is because all of these companies have to compress their content to be able to serve millions of customers reliably and in a timely fashion.

How noticeable the difference between Blu-ray’s full HD and the other flavors of HD is will depend on how perceptive you are as well as on the size and quality of your HDTV. Generally speaking, the larger the TV, the more obvious the differences. But the difference in quality between a DVD and a BD should be obvious on any HDTV. Everything looks better in HD. The colors are more saturated, the blacks are deeper, and the difference between what’s in and out of focus is much sharper. While these quality improvements are welcome, one of the unwelcome effects of moving to Blu-ray is the waiting. I bought a current generation Sony player and it takes a good 45 seconds for a BD to start up. Moreover, the fast forward and rewind controls are not as nimble as they are on a standard DVD. This is due to the immense data load that the player has to process and it noticeably impairs the overall user experience. This issue improves with each generation of player that comes out, but the only one that doesn’t suffer from somewhat sluggish performance currently is Sony’s Playstation 3 gaming system.

Many people have made the PS3 their Blu-Ray player and with the PS3 Slim now coming in at $300, it is actually price-competitive with the dedicated players. I didn’t end up going with the PS3 (I’m not a heavy gamer and I would have had to buy an extra dongle to get it to work with my universal remote), but the 8 cores in that machine’s Cell processor make for a very snappy Blu-ray experience.

Special Features & BD-Live

Building on the wildly popular special features found on DVD’s, BD’s try to offer an even more interactive experience. In general, BD’s are designed in much the same way that DVD’s are. They have chapters and special features along with support for subtitles and alternative audio tracks. But unlike traditional DVD’s, many BD’s forgo static menu pages. On these BD’s you access the features via a navigation ribbon that pops up on the bottom third of the screen while the movie is running in the background.

To take special features to the next level, some BD’s support a platform called “BD-Live.” The ideas behind this technology are very compelling. First, it seeks to expand the universe of the movie to include more featurettes and video content than can fit on one or two BD’s. Additionally, it adds social features like the ability to schedule group screenings and upload your own picture-in-picture commentary. Unfortunately, BD-Live is a half-baked and poorly implemented technology the use of which can only be described as an excercise in masochism.

The video content takes a long time to download and for some reason, the system is incredibly unstable. While I was testing it, a download got stuck, bringing the whole interface to a crashing freeze. What’s worse, there was no easy way to get out of BD-Live and back to the movie without restarting the disc. All this pain comes after you’ve traversed multiple barriers to entry. For BD-Live to work at all, your Blu-ray player must both have local storage and connect to the internet. For me this meant buying a Blu-ray player with built in wireless capabilities in addition to buying a separate USB key to stick in the back of the player. Once I had all of this set up, I then had to sign up for a free account with Warner BD-Live, before I was finally able to access the content.

The Future

The future of Blu-ray as a platform seems to be guaranteed by the fact that all of the major studios are now releasing everything that they make on Blu-Ray. But the competition is coming hard and heavy from online services like Amazon, iTunes, and Netflix, all of whom currently offer very compelling and convenient ways of accessing HD content. What’s more, Apple just started adding extra features to their HD movies on iTunes, closing the gap between their digital offerings and Blu-ray even further. Should you buy a Blu-ray player? Absolutely. The price has come down far enough and there are enough titles available, that it is definitely worth buying in at this point. You can have a brand name profile 1.2 compliant Blu-ray player(accept nothing less) for around $150. My Sony BDP-S560 does a great job of upconverting all of the old DVD’s and BD’s look and sound fantastic on our home entertainment system.

The Blu-ray platform does, however, face some formidible challenges. Computer manufacturers are not adopting Blu-ray as quickly as expected. Steve Jobs famously called Blu-ray a “bag of hurt” (due to the byzantine liscensing agreements required) and Apple computers to this day do not support commercial Blu-ray playback. This is worriesome, because, as you recall, the adoption of the DVD reached its tipping point with the integration of the DVD drive into computers. This has been mimicked on a small scale by the success of the PS3, but for true widespread adoption, Blu-ray will need to integrate with the personal computer.

As a small independent producer I would be remiss if I did not also mention the fact that while I would love to release my own work on Blu-ray, the current liscensing fees required to do so are prohibitively expensive. What this means is that it’s simply not cost-effective for me and many other independent producers to release our work on Blu-ray. If this platform is to survive at all, someone needs to figure out a way to simplify the liscensing for both computer manufacturers and independent producers.If all of these artificial barriers to entry are eliminated, and BD-Live actually becomes usable, Blu-ray can count on a very bright future. Until then, I’ll sit back and enjoy The Dark Knight in all its Blu-ray glory.