Mr. Wilkes:
You may have misunderstood my post of July 8th in this thread.
For the record, when DVDA first came out, I saw plenty of reviews of hardware in the A/V press that cast a negative light on the use of menus on what the reviewers saw as a high resolution audio format, not a DVD. This was often cited as a reason for the preference by the reviewer for SACD as a format. I didn't agree with much of the reviewers' often politically motivated positions, but this may have been a factor that hurt the success of DVDA.
Then that was down to the reviewer - DVD-A is definitely DVD.....and again it seems that we have a case of "damned if you do & damned if you don't" when it comes to onscreen menus etc. I don't see any other way of doing these so that things are easily accessible unless the content is solely one album, with absolutely no value added content (aka bonus material) at all. We'd certainly never have got the King Crimson or Porcupine Tree titles on SACD as it's not possible to put that much content on the disc, and video is simply not an option at all.
Of all the "reasons" given as to why SACD was "better" by some reviewers the one that still makes my blood boil is the "you must have special hardware to play these" one, as if you don't need specialist hardware for DSD playback. But I digress.....
Actually, I have personally owned a few DVDA discs which were either poorly authored, or did not work with the firmware of my specific DVDA player. These discs did not default to play, nor did they go to the top menu. In fact, without a monitor attached, in some cases I could not play a disc because I had to be able to see the menu items to get to play, which was not always the top selection in the top menu. Also, with some discs, there are various streams with stereo, 5.1 compressed, and 5.1 uncompressed tracks. Without a monitor attached to see where these selections are on the menu, you sometimes can only get the stereo stream. For me, personally, I didn't care. I always have had a monitor attached, so it was not a problem.
Whilst I see your point here, what would you propose as an alternative? The only options we have available as authors here is to start playback of title domain or Audio Manager domain (album or menu system). We've experimented with autoplay of title domain (PT's "Stupid Dream" works in this manner) and it has irritated some people, pleased others & the vast majority don't seem to care either way. I'll put my proposal at the end of this....but I agree with you - there are some pretty poor efforts out there, as well as some superbly thought out ones. One of the reasons (I think) for the variations is that a lot of the screen designs are made by graphic designers who are thinking computers & mouseover access and have no idea what you can & more importantly
cannot do with hardware players, leaving poor saps like me to try & make it work somehow.
Ultimately, had the labels and hardware companies agreed on one format and marketed it properly, as they did with compact disc, we might have seen a different result.
I could not agree more.
I look forward to the ELP releases on August 14th. I'll be buying them both. I can now even enjoy them a bit more knowing I've had the pleasure to converse through this forum with the engineer who authored the discs.
Steven.
Glad to hear it - you'll not be disappointed with the quality, I can assure you of that. Thanks also need to go to Steven for the work he has done, and for talking Sony into taking this leap of faith & trusting him when he said we could get the job done for them. It's almost impossible to understate what (to quote Steven) is such a huge leap of faith on their part.
As far as standardization goes, it will be close to impossible as everyone does these things in a different way. That being said, we try to get as close as possible and the way these discs have been set up is so that the initial splash screen goes to the main title page and will never be seen again and the default selected button is PLAY.
Audio_TS is defaulted to the 5.1 stream, Video_TS is defaulted to the stereo stream (I figured most surround heads will likely as not have DVD-A access set to 5.1, and the bulk of people using the Video_TS will probably be after the high res stereo streams - plus it's not a great plan to default playback to DTS either.
To my way of thinking, I'd love to see BD-Audio take off but the costs are still prohibitive and the player penetration is still a heck of a lot smaller than DVD.
There are well over 500,000,000 DVD players out there, all of which can play this disc in at least High Res stereo mode.
If we count PS3 sales as "BD Players" (even though 95% of them are being used exclusively as games consoles) we have around 15,000,000 out there.
So the labels have options as follows:
1 - BD-Audio type discs as standalone discs.
Pros - prime content only available on BD might drive sales.
Cons - Only available on BD will almost certainly cost lost sales, as not everyone has a BD player. No CD content. No in-car players. expensive to produce & replicate
2 - DVD-A type discs as standalone discs
Pros - same audio quality as BD in general (nobody is really doing 7.1 or 24/192 5.1)
Cons - requiring an audio-capable player to access content will cost lost sales (same argument as against BD standalone). No CD content
3 - DVD-AV/BD double pack.
Pros - everyone is happy
Cons - price (expensive to produce, expensive to replicate). No CD content. DVD must be a DVDA or in-car players will struggle a lot of the time.
4 - CD/DVD-AV double pack
Pros - everyone's a winner.
Cons - limited to SD video, but most BD "bonus" video is usually SD anyway. (concert titles are another matter altogether and should always be DVD/BD packs).
The trick, which was ignored completely by the nay-sayers 10 years ago, is to make sure you also put a decent Video_TS title set in there as well as the Audio_TS.
and by decent, I mean LPCM stereo & DTS 5.1, leaving Dolby Digital well out of the whole picture as it has no place in a music title. Such a disc is universal, and moreover gives you the exact same quality as BD.
SACD for me is a non starter. It's again expensive to produce (although relatively easy to put together), and you are limited
heavily in terms of content. Putting the same content we crammed onto some of the Crimson titles would have taken 4 or 5 SACD discs to duplicate.
. Anyone got this Working on a Oppo 83 (or 93)?
