If you bought the first Blu-ray players back in 2006 - I’m sorry for your troubles. The cutting edge of bragging rights is an expensive and frustrating place to be.

Warner’s recent announcement they were siding exclusively with Blu-ray had early adopters happy they didn’t pick HD DVD. But the truth is early adopters don’t even have a real Blu-ray player - nobody has, because the format isn’t complete!

The Blu-ray Disc Association realized Blu-ray wasn’t ready to compete with HD DVD when that format was ready for business. So, it released its players in a sequence of profiles.

Blu-ray Profiles - everything you need to know!

Profile 1.0: Definitely not ready

Profile 1.1: Almost ready

Profile 2.0: Finally ready to compete with HD DVD.

The Blu-ray Disc Association’s profiles scheme should go down in history as one of the worst cases of vendor hostility toward customers.

Profile 1.0 Blu-ray disc players won’t decode BonusView. It’s what Blu-ray calls special features on some new Blu-ray discs involving a picture- in- picture window. It’s used to show special features alongside a movie’s playback. The equivalent feature was used in Warner’s HD DVD release of the movie 300.

The worst thing about most of the 1.0 players is how slow they run.

Players I tested by Sony and Samsung locked up on occasion while trying to navigate the disc menu. This is especially bad where the movie has an animated menu like the new Die Hard Blu-ray releases. It can take minutes to navigate to the audio options, select one and then select "play."

When Blu-ray discs load you’re sitting through endless movie trailers. Trying to skip forward through them on a slow player is torture. Pauses and lock-ups are common.

You may think you’re loading up a clean, family Disney movie for the kids. But by the time Dad has loaded up Ratatouille, he’s already unleashed such a torrent of foul language the kids might as well be sitting down to watch Goodfellas.

Blu-ray Profile 2.0 isn’t even out yet. That’s the version where Blu-ray finally has everything HD DVD always had, including a LAN connection.

For a next-generation disc format that is supposedly winning the war, Blu-ray sure has a long way to go to catch up to HD DVD.

Tags: iPhone, Microsoft, Mobile Computing

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.