Put a DVD in a DVD player, press play; the disc takes 2-3 seconds to spin up, and then a split-second later, you’re either watching a preview, or staring at the DVD’s main menu.
Put a Blu Ray disc in a BD player, and press player; it’ll likely be a good minute, maybe longer, before anything appears on the screen (besides a “LOADING” icon of some sort).
So what’s taking so goddam long? The data rate for Blu Ray discs is reportedly 4+ MB/s. With that kind of data rate, it seems like you should be able to load a beautiful HD splash screen and the most complicated menu program ever in less than a second.
Well, most of that data is video, so it won’t be needed all at once. What BD does have, far more than DVD, is programs. All those fancy menus and interactive features are programs (written, I believe, in a flavour of Java). The disc player needs to load and run them. I suspect that cheap BD players skimp on their internal CPU, memory, etc, that runs these programs, as well as on the mechanical parts, so the programs load more slowly, run more slowly, and need to request more data from the disc more often… over and above the job of decoding video and audio and making it available to the outputs.
DVD players have a capability to run programs as well, but they aren’t in Java and aren’t nearly as complex.
Right. We both agree that a BD player is capable of tremendous data transfer rates. The link in my OP claims “1X” is defined as 36 Mbps (4.5 MB/s), but that BD-ROM movies actually require 54 Mbps (6.75 MB/s).
So if a Blu Ray disc takes 60 seconds to load, this implies that the player could be reading as much as 400 megabytes of information off of the disc before anything shows up on the screen. What could it possibly be loading that takes up so much space/memory?
Loading a menu? a 1920x1080 background JPEG stored with minimal compression only occupies a couple of megabytes at most; the code for a menu ought not occupy more than a few kilobytes.
Loading a movie clip w/sound to play repeatedly in the background of the menu? Fine, 20 megabytes; that’s still only three seconds of read time. What’s going on for the remaining 57 seconds?
Autoloading the first preview/commercial? Fine, load the first frame of video (2 megabytes, remember?), then start playing the clip whilst continuing to stream the rest of the clip from the disc.
So the question remains: if the player is pulling 400 megabytes of data off of the disc before anything shows up on screen, what is that 400 MB of data? If it’s not pulling that much data off of the disc, then what’s it doing during that time?
My apologies… I read TWNPsycho’s figures as total data capacity of the disc, not sustained data transfer rate. Doesn’t change the main thrust of my argument though…
I suspect it’s not so much loading as processing. What if it has to do things like do some kind of DRM checking between the player and the disc, set up a bunch of menus, assign video clips to menus, set up the interactive games, and so on? Maybe the manufacturer buys the minimum necessary hardware to conform to the specs, and hopes the the user will just put up with the delays, kind of like the way a PC specced to the “minimum” requirements for a program won’t handle it very well, and you go for the “recommended” spec.
I wonder if this just occurs with older BluRay players? I got a newer 3D Samsung unit about a month ago and was annoyed that discs were taking 4-8 seconds to load unlike my regular DVD player that loaded discs almost instantly.
When I read about it on-line and heard that some people were waiting up to a minute I was shocked.
I’ve got a blu-ray drive in my home theater PC. Loading is pretty close to the speed of a DVD. But then again, programs that require CPU time are going to benefit from a full CPU over whatever weak sauce hardware is on the average blu-ray player.
That’s plausible - although one would expect that BD player manufacturers would offer players at a range of price points, from ~$150 (go cook dinner while your movie loads) to ~$600 (sit down with your beer and pretzels ready, THEN push play on the remote). The reality is that at the time we bought our player (summer '09), I don’t recall any of the BD players on the market having a load time less than about thirty seconds.
I do believe it’s because BD is much newer than DVD. When the first DVDs came out, they loaded much slower than they do today too. You’re comparing a new technology with another after years of improvements.
I have not used a Blu-ray player, but my DVD player from 2000 plays DVD’s(that I got in 2000) almost immediately. It also plays brand new DVD’s right away.
My Blu-Ray goes from inserting a disc to the previews starting within a few seconds, what bugs me is that I have yet to find any way to jump to the home screen. The best I can do is manually skip each preview as it comes up.
Also, I still find it odd that there’s no way for the BD player to save where I am in the movie. I read something somewhere that said that because BDs are fundamentally different the DVDs it’s just not possible to skip to a specific section, but I find that odd. I know it can jump to a specific chapter, why not a certain time? It’s especially annoying because of the way my remote is setup it’s really easy to accidentally stop the movie and have to find your spot again.
JoeyP, that’s unfortunately an isuue with your particular player, not blu-ray disks themselves. I can stop a movie on mine, take the disk out, put in a different disk, watch the whole thing, turn off the player, put the original disk back in a week later and it will ask me if I want to continue from where I stopped, and jump to the exact spot, not just the beginning of the chapter.
Take a look in your manual. My Samsung player said it could do it but you had to be careful to hit the stop button ‘once’ and ‘once’ only. If you hit it any more times it forgot where you had stopped.
That’s how my last player was. In fact, that’s how all my previous players were, this one just doesn’t like to do that. Most of my annoyance is due to the remote. The HOME button, which takes you to the home screen for the BD player itself is right next to the the “right” arrow. So if I miss that and hit the home button, in the middle of a movie, say, while trying to turn subtitles on, it means trying to find my place again. If it wasn’t for that, it wouldn’t be a big deal.
Or, I just haven’t figured it out yet, I also can’t believe there isn’t a way to jump to the main screen, bypassing all the previews.
Maybe it’ll come down in a firmware/software update someday.
The games, at least the games I’ve played, don’t seem to take an inordinate amount of time to load, but Blu-Ray movies do. Considering that the PS3 is supposed to be a computing powerhouse relative to a DVD player, that’s disappointing. Every Blu-Ray disc I’ve spun has taken quite a while to get to even the first menu screen. Violators include Up, Iron Man 2, and Zombieland.
I have an early Blu-Ray player (bought just before they pulled the plug on HD DVD), but it is a high-end one, and it sometimes takes well more than a minute of loading. Sometimes it says “Loading” and sometimes it shows an animated icon that it got off the disc. It does this only for Blu-Ray disks; DVDs start nearly immediately.
It seems to me that DVDs start immediately because it doesn’t load the whole disc (around 4G) on startup, it reads data during playback.
How much data does a Blu-Ray player really have to load before it can start? Is high-def video data density too high to read it in real-time, so it either has to load the whole thing up front, or buffer a shitload?
I have this problem. It works for DVDs but not for Blu-Ray.
I’ve had my Blu-Ray player a couple years and noticed that if I don’t upgrade the firmware now and then, it’ll bog down with newer (and presumably more feature-glutted) discs. I’ve had one or two discs (“9” comes to mind) that just said and said “loading” without doing anything until I upgraded and then it loaded fine.