I just got a Blu-ray player. A Samsung BD-J7500. I have experience with several DVD players, but not a Blu-ray player. I purchased a Star Trek: Next Generation Blu-ray and while it plays fine.
However, if you turn it off in the middle of an episode like I’m use to doing on DVD players, when I hit “play” to resume it powers the unit back on, but it doesn’t resume from where I powered it off. It starts from the beginning like it was the first time I put the disc in the player.
Today I put in a DVD of The Sopranos into the Blu-ray player, and it behaved as expected. It was able to resume after the unit had been powered off.
Is this a feature lacking in Blu-ray as a format? Or just some Blu-ray discs? Or is it a function of this specific player that it can’t support resuming with a Blu-ray disc? If so, what Blu-ray players can resume the playing of Blu-ray discs?
I’ve had several Blu-Ray players (Samsung, Sony, Panasonic) and while they all claim to have the ‘resume playback’ feature it seems to be sketchy at best and is always hit or miss. When I want it to work it never does. And then at other times I’ll put a blu-ray disc in the player that I never finished watching weeks ago and the machine will ask “resume playback?”
My PS3 does this all the time. I think it has to do with the disks. I have some Blu-Ray disks that always start over, which always upsets the kids, and then I have some that will start right where I left off, even months later. The strange thing is that DVDs almost always start where it was left off, which really sucks trying to start a movie over months later as going to the main menu and saying start it just picks right back up.
The problem is with the subset of Bluray discs that play the movie through their integrated Java software, rather than through the player’s own hardware. If this really annoys you, watch out for any discs indicated as “BD-J,” “Bonus View,” or “BD Live.” Having both a player and a disc that supports Java gives you some fancy extra features, like video commentary in a picture-in-picture. But it also prevents the player hardware from saving a simple resume-point like it does for DVD and non-Java Bluray. You may be able to save a bookmark from the menu instead.
I have an early Pioneer Blu-Ray player, very good player though I bought it when Blu-Ray was new (and the Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD battle was still being fought). I have never, not once, been able to resume a Blu-Ray disc after turning off the player in the middle of a movie. I just figured this was a Blu-Ray thing. It *does *resume consistently for standard DVDs.
Now that I see others are getting this to work maybe it’s time for me to upgrade.
Thanks for the technical explanation. I’m a software person, so this makes the most sense to me. What doesn’t make sense as a format, it why they didn’t incorporate into the design a way for the user to still be able to support the “resume” function that was so common in the DVD format. I would have thought that by now, this would be corrected in modern Blu-ray discs and the players. But the compatibility issue might be more complicated than this since they allowed developers to have full control over the disc like this, then there might not be an easy fix to the firmware in the Blu-ray player to support “resume”.
What puzzles me, is why this has not seemed to bother the publishers of the Blu-ray. Perhaps, for example in this Star Trek: Next Generation Blu-ray, the only way for them to produce the fancy looking menu displays was to not support the “resume” feature. If I hit the disc menu button on the remote while this disc is playing, it displays a messages on the screen that this is not permitted and I have to use the on-screen navigation.
A new Blu-ray disc from Netflix arrived today. It doesn’t appear to be fancy like the Star Trek Blu-ray with it being a simple drama. It will be interesting to see if this one allows a “resume” or not.
For those wondering why I care about this. This set-up is in front of the treadmill and since I only exercise for 30 minutes I want to return to where I left off what I was viewing. I guess I’m going to have to keep a pad a paper there and write down where I left off. In 2015 this sounds silly, but I don’t want to watch DVD versions which look grainy on my set-up just to get the “resume” feature.
I have a Blu-ray USB drive connected to my Mac Mini. I wonder if I burned a simple Blu-ray home movie on it from iMovie, it would “resume” without a problem in the Blu-ray player.
I would have expected the same menu software used in DVDs to be in Blu-ray, but the new format might have afforded the developer to take advantage of more resources.
That’s a good question. I don’t know if this Blu-ray player would support that or not. I thought DVD players might time-out on a pause, but I might be thinking of the DVR.