When you try to play your latest, smash hit, movie disc, does your player "freeze up" part way through? Does this always seem to happen just as the movie gets to the GOOD part? Does it then ignore all your desperate efforts to get it playing again?
And are your friends and family now judging you; given all the money you've spent on your Home Theater system, only to have THIS happen?
Is that your problem, Bunky?
Well take heart old chum! Your problem may have an easy fix: Clean The Disc!
Read moreMovie discs, be they SD-DVD, Blu-ray, or UHD, have many advantages: Superior picture quality and access to the best audio tracks, for example. They are also permanent: Not subject to the temporary nature of Studio content licensing contracts, which can leave you in the lurch when the “streaming” content you thought you had "purchased" suddenly stops being available!
But that doesn't mean discs are entirely free of annoyances! And right at the top of most anybody's list of complaints would be that most movie and TV show discs try to FORCE you to watch commercials before you get to see your show!
In this post we will discuss the mysterious and frustrating world of Prohibited User Operations (PUOs, or sometimes, confusingly, UOPs).
Read moreOne of the biggest, conceptual changes introduced with Blu-ray discs (and continued with UHD Blu-ray discs) was the idea the Studio could include computer program code -- software -- ON the disc, which would load and run whenever you played that disc, and which would CONTROL that playback. No longer would disc playback be strictly limited to the "user interface" features implemented by each, different, Blu-ray player! So long as the player could run the on-disc software, the DISC could invent its OWN user interface! There was nothing like this for prior, SD-DVD discs.
This on-disc software would be written in a variant of the Java programming language to be called "BD-J" (Blu-ray Disc Java). The expectations for how Studios would use BD Java were truly grand -- to begin with. All sorts of fancy features were proposed to "enhance" the customer value of these discs. The actual result has been rather a mixed bag. In particular, some Studios seem to be most keen on how BD Java can be used to make a disc really difficult to copy -- something which has NOTHING to do with the customer’s experience.
In this post I'll talk about BD Java, and how it relates to the perennial complaint: My disc player won't let me do Resume Play on my movie!
Read moreWriter/Director Christopher Nolan has called his blockbuster an "experimental" film; and that is both its genius and its problem. This shortish film (only 106 minutes) *IS* an experiential masterpiece. But that is accomplished at the expense of traditional story-telling and character development. It will not appeal to everyone, particularly if you come to it thinking you are about to see a typical, Hollywood-mytholgized, period history film. Ya know, with big name stars the audience can root for!
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