Amen Shane. A lot of BD supporters have been saying that they personally don't care about Profile 1.1 or 2.0, they just want to watch the movie. As your blog points out, however, even playing the recent/upcoming movies is a problem. Waiting three minutes to load the movie is ludicrous! One wonders how much faster Profile 1.1 players (if they ever come out) will be on these titles. I fear that they may not be much better...leaving us with a playback system in which more and more movies take minutes to load. This is unacceptable. I have no idea what the BD group is thinking or doing about this, but if they don't see this as a huge problem, they have their heads up their backsides. Come on BD group, I've been waiting for you guys to straighten things out but things are only getting worse!

As a side note, I seriously wonder just what Fox is doing. First they only release lossless audio tracks in DTS-MA, which no current player can decode yet (3rd gen players!). Then this. I honestly don't get it. DVD did not have these problems.

This issue is another result of the format war. If we had had collaboration between developers to arrive at one single format then players, profiles and content would not be rushing at us unprepared and without any thought to the consumer. Pricing of players in the $200-$300 range will not help people accept this either. Unfortunately many of these issues are not known to the average consumer that will be buying, and as Shane indicates returning, players and discs that do not play properly or within a reasonable amount of time. This will move like wild fire through consumers, resulting in both formats suffering. I could live with both formats, but the players and content need a lot more maturing before they will gain mainstream acceptance. A $200 player and Santa Claus isn't going to cut it.

Tyler- Regardless of what some consumers think, the studios feel strongly that interactivity is going to be a big part of selling HD to consumers. The Blu-ray studios feel this way too as is evident by the growing number of Blu-ray titles being announced with more and more advanced features. And on top of that, the studios are just starting to explore new revenue streams that work off of web interactivity. And as for the format growing pains argument, well, Blu-ray has been on the market for over a year, and manufacturers are on second and third generations of players. I am surprised these issues are persisting.

Steve, the manufacturers did get together early on in this process and they did come up with a unified standard for HD discs, and that was HD DVD. But then a few of them then broke off and decided they wanted to try something different. If there was ever a question of who fired the first shot in this war, it is the Blu-ray group. Had they done it right, nobody would have cared, but the Blu-ray group is good at marketing and crappy at implementation. To continue the analogy, it's like the BD group's weapon of choice is a gun that misfires on queue.

I don't care what Fred thinks, I want to know Derf's take on this.

I just want for people to think about this for a minute: Who really makes a format suscessful? ...who makes it possible for it been adopted? Well, in my opinion I think it is Joe Average, the guy or gal, that does not have more that $200 or even $150 to spend on a DVD player. never mind all the fancy interactivity, etc... price is the key! All of us that buy these state of the art, new technology players costing hundreds of dollars do not really make the big difference when it comes to a format been adopted or not, remember DVD Audio, etc? In the end, if Joe Average keeps on buying regular DVDs (and players) and stays away from the high def formats, due to those problems you wrote about, aka slow load times, not to mention high expense players, etc. these formats could end up been another format that went nowhere. I want one to win...anyone, but one that works good, delivering in the goods and with a decent price. I think that is what Joe Average (or Joet, excuse me) is waiting for too...!

Whoever is running Fox is an idiot. I will never buy another Fox movie until they CONVINCE me they care about the consumer. And I buy a lot of content. I have a new Sony XBR2 and a new LG multiblue and first I have to go get a Firmware update to SEE the DVD, and then it still will not work as the audio they include cannot be decoded. BS.

The DVD was the new Blue Ray release of Day after tomorrow.

Luis- Do these people really exist? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that in adjusted dollars, that both the VCR and the DVD player became fairly ubiquitous before hitting price points that low. As I pointed out to you in Fred's Blog, the iPod, the Nintendo Wii, even the Xbox 360 have all sold millions of units in spite of carrying prices above $200. This isn't counting other cel phones, PDAs, etc. I just don't think that magic price point is that low anymore. On the other hand, this is also what happens when manufacturers devalue their products and market fraudulently. Lemme 'splain. At Sears this weekend I saw Toshiba selling a progressive scan DVD player for $50. So, once you get people hooked on that, apparently selling them an awesme hi-def player for $299 gets tougher. And, this is on the heels of years of many companies marketing upconverting players as being "high-def." Add those together and this is what you get.

Doug- I'm frustrated too, but hardly ready to advocate a boycott. And correct me if I'm wrong, but as frustrating as it is to not be able to decode the DTS-HD MA track at full res, you do get the "core" stream at 1.5Mbps, which isn't chopped liver. Now, don't get me wrong. At this point in time, it is my opinion that Fox would have done far better by its customers to do TrueHD lossless since we're now waiting for third and fourth-gen players to decode DTS lossless. But think about this too. When DVD came around the first time there was outcry from enthusiasts for DTS even though hardware was lagging. Fox listened and was one of DTS' most ardent supporters among studios. Looking back on that experience Fox could be anticipating the same thing. In other words, maybe they are trying to do the right thing here.

Shane, these are good points. One can argue till they're blue in the face whether it is better to be backwards compatible for existing machines, or push the envelope. One thing that is true, however, is that your movie purchase will very likely outlive any player you currently have - just think of how many DVD players you purchased over the last seven years or so. I remember my first couldn't decode DTS! I expect I'll be buying more than one blu-ray player going forward (assuming that there is a hi-def disc format that survives after this stupid war).

Shane, regardless of what audio they are using, and I agree with your points, I still cannot watch the disc, the most recent update fixed the video but not the audio, it still skips in an out, a new fix is still needed.

Doug- that certainly is a problem. And yes, you'd think with the still relatively low number of players on the market that QC wouldn't be so difficult. It certainly isn't going to get any easier as more players come out. And as I said in the piece, it's very bunk for Fox to absolve itself of all responsibility.

Hi Shane. This question is completely OT, I know, but I'm trying to decide between a PS3 and a BDP1200. I've read both your review of the former and TJN's of the latter, but did not find a direct comparison. If you wouldn't mind, I'd be interested to hear how you think they compare for: (1) Blu-Ray playback via HDMI; (2) Upscaling DVDs to 1080i/60, with output via HDMI; and (3) 2-channel analog audio output (yes, I'm a Luddite, and still listen to HT through my 2-channel audiophile-grade stereo system). [Indeed, I sold my Theta D/A converter, so whatever player I buy will become, for now, the only way I have to play back CDs.]

Still no fix for the LG BH 100 on Fox Frisbees.............

I agree with Shane in that any blame game will just taint the HD industry, and the average consumer won't understand all of the factors at play that are wrecking their experience. I would think that we do know some of the factors here (users of Ultimate AV) and we should not really be surprised that this is happening. When you have a format that was not final before devices start coming out, is not standardized among players, and will continue to change, can you really expect that anything different will happen? News flash, its going to continue for quite a while as well. It is becoming increasingly clear that the only stable medium for the near future of BD is the PS3. From what I can recall, I believe that it was the first BD product with HDMI 1.3 support, one of the few that can provide a decent load time, actually uses BD-J, has ethernet support, and will work with PiP. Please correct me if I am wrong. We are blaming Fox for this? Why not tell all BD publishers to hobble their movie prod

Sorry, should have read-- Why not tell all BD publishers to hobble their movie products then? (don't know why it got cut off, it said i had characters left...)

The reason I blame Fox is they put out these discs that most, if not all, BluRay players cannot play, without warning the hardware folks well in advance what they were planning so that a Firmware fix could have been in the works ( there are not that many companies ), and they did not warn the " general public " of such problems. People who have some technical expertise or know of all the forums can get some answers pretty quick and try to get the problem solved, most people do not have a clue what has happened.

I totally agree in that this should have never happened, but the way I see it, Fox was trying to take advantage of a specification, which I applaud them in doing. That said, should they have advised the public and hw manufacturers? Yes they should. Is it their fault that there are garbage players on the market? No. I would scold the authors of that specification (or standard, or whatever you want to call it) for making parts of it optional. That is not a standard, sorry. I would then scold the hardware manufacturers for not including features that they knew full well would be necessary for a meaningful experience. My last thought: If the Blu-ray assoc wants to have different profiles and levels of functionality, it needs to be mandatory to display it on the unit, and the movie as well. A simple sticker on the player could say "Profile 1.1" and the movie could say "For full functionaltiy a player with Profile 1.1 is required."

Fox should keep pushing the envelope, and should be applauded for doing so. But doing decent QC shouldn't be such a stretch with so relatively few players around. Samsung isn't exactly an off brand. While I smell what you're cooking with the Profile sticker, the point I've been making is that I believe it's putting too much of the onus on joe six pack to know what the hell Profile 1.1 is. I write about this stuff so our readers here know, but let's face it this is an enthusiast audience here. The average guy isn't going to know, and is just going to end up pissed when the discs don't work or don't access all the features. All the Blu-boys want to poo-poo this, but this is what Paramount and others mean when they say HD DVD is a more stable interactivity platform. All the discs work on all the players that have an HD DVD logo. I think it stinks that there are third and fourth-gen players coming out now that won't play features coming early next y

next year? next yelp? next yak? next ??? Hey I-Man! somebody gotta fix this problem

LG has a firmware update on their website in case some still do not know for the Fox discs, it works.