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| Registered: March 13, 2007 | Reputation:  |  Posts: 3,321 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting Vega: Quote:
I guess I'll be finding out myself when I get home. My A3 just arrived.. Christmas has come early! I feel like a little kid with a new toy. Now, I need to come up with a plan to sneak it into the house and hook it up without my wife noticing...  Congratulations! Well, early congratulations I guess unless you can fool the wife.  | | | Get the CSVExport and Database Query plug-ins here.
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| Registered: September 7, 2007 | | Posts: 265 |
| | Posted: | | | | Don't know if it's really relevant or not but I got my five free today. "Only" took about 7 weeks. I was surprised. Pleasantly of course.  |
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| Registered: September 7, 2007 | | Posts: 265 |
| | Posted: | | | | Mark, that's the same thing I do. Power up the unit, get the disc ready and voila, it's show time! It's a great little trick to make that boot time magically disappear. |
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| Registered: May 19, 2007 | Reputation:  | | Posts: 5,918 |
| | Posted: | | | | It's kind of like replacing all of your incandescent light bulbs with fluorescent bulbs. If you're used to having light the instant you flip the wall switch, it'll take a little while to get used to the slight delay with fluorescents. |
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| Registered: June 12, 2007 | Reputation:  | | Posts: 2,665 |
| | Posted: | | | | So i stopped an episode of Heroes on HD-DVD on my HD-A30 last night a couple minutes into it and powered off the machine. Just powered it back on and it starts from scratch. No memory of where it was.  So i started exploring some more and on the menu, which appears to be disc specific is an option called My Scenes. If a show is running and i press the "B" key on the remote a bookmark is created. I did that, powered off/on again and went to My Scenes...no bookmark, just an explanation of what My Scenes is. I then found this thread which helped me realize i must start the disc (that is Play something) then access the menu and select My Scenes. When i do that i see my bookmark and can jump there. But i must remember to bookmark first. There is also a Resume Play button. I haven't found it useful yet either. I'll tackle that next. Regarding Persistent Storage: I think it's on by default on these players. Every time i go to it via the Maintenance menu it asks if i want to Start it. So either it powers off when i power off the machine or it's always on and this is their bumbling check to see if i meant to press that button. Sorry to go off-topic on these little rants but hopefully it will help someone else go into their purchase with eyes open.  | | | | Bad movie? You're soaking in it! |
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| Registered: March 29, 2007 |  Posts: 410 |
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| Registered: March 13, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 3,321 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting tweeter: Quote:
So i stopped an episode of Heroes on HD-DVD on my HD-A30 last night a couple minutes into it and powered off the machine.
Just powered it back on and it starts from scratch. No memory of where it was. I have an HD-A2 (actually, it's the HD-D2, but it's the same physical machine). What your tests verifed is how HD DVD discs work (and Blu-ray from what I've read). If you power off the player, you start from scratch. I'm not aware of any discs to date that are programmed to resume. Although I have seen the HDi code to do so. What you can do is resume regular DVDs. At least on the A2. The trick is from the powered off state, you have to press play. Then it will resume where you left off. If you hit the power button first to turn on the machine, it will start from scratch. And if the disc is removed, it will also start from scratch. Even if the new technology requires the HD DVDs to code their own resume function, there's no excuse for DVDs to not work as expected. In fact, there's 128MB of memory (196MB on the X-Box add-on if I remember correctly). I'd LOVE to see a future update add the ability for DVDs to resume properly. It really comes in handy on TV sets. The other thing I'd love to see is a time remaining display. On the A2 it will show the time remaining on the player's display when you push Display button. But it would be nice to see the time remaining on the screen along with the other information. It's very hard to read on the player's tiny display. | | | Get the CSVExport and Database Query plug-ins here.
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| Registered: June 12, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 2,665 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting Mark Harrison: Quote:
What you can do is resume regular DVDs. At least on the A2. I've kept my DVD player connected since it powers on so fast so i haven't played a DVD in the A30 yet. Quote:
The other thing I'd love to see is a time remaining display. On the A2 it will show the time remaining on the player's display when you push Display button. But it would be nice to see the time remaining on the screen along with the other information. It's very hard to read on the player's tiny display. They didn't improve that one bit on the A30. | | | | Bad movie? You're soaking in it! |
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| Registered: March 13, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 3,321 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting tweeter: Quote:
Quoting Mark Harrison:
Quote:
What you can do is resume regular DVDs. At least on the A2.
I've kept my DVD player connected since it powers on so fast so i haven't played a DVD in the A30 yet. I moved my player upstairs to replace an inadaquate player in our bedroom. Plus the upconverting abilities of the new player are far better than what I had (it had NO upconverting). If you already have a great player, that probably makes sense. | | | Get the CSVExport and Database Query plug-ins here.
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| Registered: May 19, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 585 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting Mark Harrison: Quote:
Quoting Vega:
Quote:
I guess I'll be finding out myself when I get home. My A3 just arrived.. Christmas has come early! I feel like a little kid with a new toy. Now, I need to come up with a plan to sneak it into the house and hook it up without my wife noticing...
Congratulations! Well, early congratulations I guess unless you can fool the wife. Ya, that plan didn't work out so well. I got it into the house but I was caught red handed in the middle of disconnecting the regular DVD player. I had no choice but to switch to Plan B. One of the free 3 movies I chose with the player was "Top Gun", her all time favorite movie. Before she had time to get mad I pulled that out and asked her if she'd like to watch the volleyball scene in glorious HD. I could see in her eyes I had her. Thank you Val Kilmer! Ya, so, I didn't pull out a timer (I'll probably do that tonight) but the boot-up and load time actually didn't seem so bad. It didn't feel like 30 seconds for either of them, but I was still in my little kid in a candy shop mood so I'll time it tonight. I tried 300 and was a bit underwhelmed, though I think that movie is a bit grainy by design. I popped in Alexander Revisited and I could definitely see the difference there. One thing I noticed though is that both 300 and Alexander were still letterboxed. For some reason I thought part of the point of HD movies was no more letterboxing needed. Or is that still depenent on the aspect ratio of the movie? | | | "Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men" - Douglas Bader
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." - Douglas Adams |
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| Registered: March 13, 2007 | | Posts: 844 |
| | Posted: | | | | Movies with an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 (16:9) will fill your screen entirely (a opposed to 1.33:1 for your old TV), bu anything larger than that will still have the black bars top and bottom. Once you hit 2.40:1 they will be quite pronouced.  | | | | Last edited: by bob9000 |
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| Registered: May 19, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 585 |
| | Posted: | | | | Gotcha, thanks. So I wonder when we're going to see widERscreen TVs.. like 21.5:9 (or I guess rounding up 22:9). That would fit a 2.40:1 picture very nicely. | | | "Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men" - Douglas Bader
"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." - Douglas Adams |
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| Registered: March 13, 2007 | | Reputation: | | Posts: 3,321 |
| | Posted: | | | | Quoting Vega: Quote:
Ya, that plan didn't work out so well. I got it into the house but I was caught red handed in the middle of disconnecting the regular DVD player. I had no choice but to switch to Plan B. One of the free 3 movies I chose with the player was "Top Gun", her all time favorite movie. Before she had time to get mad I pulled that out and asked her if she'd like to watch the volleyball scene in glorious HD. I could see in her eyes I had her. Thank you Val Kilmer!
Well played! Quote:
I tried 300 and was a bit underwhelmed, though I think that movie is a bit grainy by design. One of the most common problems I'm seeing with people moving to HD is they expect everything to look perfect and crystal clear (you obviously understood that's how 300 is supposed to look, so I'm not counting you in this group ). The actual goal is to faithfully represent the original movie and in some cases the original wasn't ever intended to be crystal clear. I've seen many people trashing GREAT looking transfers because they didn't understand the difference. As an example, a lot of people complained about Deliverance on HD. But that's how it's supposed to look. I remember a few years ago when they restored Animal House on DVD the director thought it looked too pristine and deliberately made it look worse to accurately represent the look he originally intended. That caused quite the debate at the time. It's easy to tell the film lovers from the HD lovers.  | | | Get the CSVExport and Database Query plug-ins here.
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