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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: Oppo Responds To On-Screen Display Question
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Gavin Lewarne
Master Film Handler
Posts: 278
From: Plymouth, UK
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 12-22-2012 04:20 AM
quote: Frank Angel
Shawn, it's not a matter of a backup for anything; it's a matter of the studios not releasing either film prints or DCPs of their classic libraries. For art theatres this is a huge problem and it just keeps getting bigger. We cope with it the best way we can. Hell, sometimes there isn't even a BRay to play...we have play DVDs. Believe me, it's not by choice
we hae the same problem sometimes, certan art-house films are ONLY released on disc, and most of the time thats DVD. Its crappy, and I hate running them from a quality an embarssment standpoint, but try convicing the "artist" or dstributor to at least switch to Blu-Ray (or DCP) an they just dont get it.....
And then, there are the times im doing some sorta one-off screening and whatever they want me to play is provided on a USB stick, with a video fle encded in those godawful proprietary Mac (apple) codecs that wont play on regular, industry standad hardware. I tell them it should be an "industry standard" avi, mpeg (ec etc) but no, for some reason thas not "cool" on a Mac.
/rant
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Wolfgang Woehl
Film Handler
Posts: 31
From: Munich, Germany
Registered: Apr 2012
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posted 12-22-2012 11:11 AM
This summer we'd let ourselves get suckered into buying an Oppo BDP-93. What were we thinking.
Its default firmware had outrageous audio sync issues. Depending on HDMI output ports usage (the BDP-93 has 2 outs) the measured latencies changed, too ![[Smile]](smile.gif) Its "default" audio latency was a bloodcurling 100 ms (2 1/2 frames).
Fun thing to do with an Oppo BDP-93: HDMI 1 to projector, HDMI 2 to monitor. Projector is on, monitor is on > playback > Monitor off. Guess what happens. If you're looking for a tell for bad engineering, that's it. "High-end" goes out the window right there. The list goes on. But what's the point really?
As for the OSD issue: We got the same answers as Frank and others. They're not interested. It doesn't help that they don't get it in the first place.
In my mind Oppo has exactly 1 thing going for them: Some marketing genius who probably earned himself a life-long free hotel suite in Shanghai, just around headquarters, That dude managed to sucker a lot of industry figures. Well, enjoy the smog.
I'd like to see a player with fully configurable OSD (which out, verbosity levels), subtitle positioning, user-configurable idle screen and true monitor out. Not that I'm holding my breath.
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Scott Jentsch
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1061
From: New Berlin, WI, USA
Registered: Apr 2003
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posted 12-27-2012 01:06 PM
quote: Randy Stankey
If a company takes the time to write a form letter it must mean that they've been asked this question enough times to warrant the writing of a form letter. A lot of people must be asking the same question.
So, then, a way to combat that would be for a lot more people to write them letters.
I would think that this is something that only a show of numbers can achieve. Ideally, NATO should take up the cause on its members' behalf and show Oppo that there is a true market for this. When they get anecdotal messages from individuals, I don't think it's going to have the same impact.
For example, a customer service person receives the feedback messages sent in via their web site. However, a sales rep is going to field a call from someone looking for volume purchases. Who is going to be able to make something like a custom firmware happen? Not the customer service rep.
A specification document of needs should be drawn up, along with a commitment to purchase x units that meet said specification within a given amount of time. It should be possible to discuss the potential order with someone at Oppo that actually can make it happen, and at the end, you should have x units available with the features you need at the price you agreed upon.
Maybe this could be a Kickstarter project? I don't know the limitations of Kickstarter, but perhaps that would be a way to show tangible interest with committed purchases lined up.
If you get 500-1,000 commitments for $300 firmware upgrades, that's $150,000-$300,000. I would think that would be very difficult for any company to ignore, provided they have the ability to customize their firmware (unlike the companies that are just piecing together chipsets to make something that works).
The challenge is finding those 500-1,000 paying orders. Does anyone think that's a realistic number? If not, what is?
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 12-28-2012 02:59 PM
quote: Mike Blakesley
I don't see why a studio would object to a theater doing this, if they had properly licensed a title for exhibition. How you get it to the screen is nobody's business.
According to the DMCA you're more or less in dark waters once you start "ripping" this copy-protected content ![[Wink]](wink.gif) .
I've had my fair share of experiences in the past. I needed to create HQ on demand content for limited distribution, but the studio would not come up with some decent source material in a timely fashion, so I grabbed it from DVDs and added tons of filters to make it look "good". Although in many countries this is perfectly legal, they still didn't like the route I'd chosen. Everything was perfectly licensed, but they bitched about me using "illegal hacker tools" to get the job done...
quote: Mike Blakesley
That said....I did a little experimenting with a Pink Panther cartoon and it took about 3 hours to make a DCP out of it using my relatively fast computer. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but if not I can't imagine how long it would take to make a DCP of a two-hour movie, and converting a Blu-Ray would take an eon or two. I guess a person needs to set up a "rendering farm" if they want to do that on a regular basis.
If you use something like OpenDCP, which uses some generic open source JPEG2000 implementation, then you're probably in for a day or so of rendering on a halfway decent machine. The problem is purely the JPEG2000 compression library, not so much your hardware. But if you plan ahead, even that should not be your biggest problem.
Commercial products can do the job in a fraction of this time and often with better looking results, but they cost quite some money and are a bad investment if you do not regularly need them.
quote: Randy Stankey
I think you need compression hardware for your computer. You can get various cards that slip into your PCI slots to do the job of compressing video without weighing down the CPU which isn't really designed for the job.
The biggest problem is getting your software to work with those kind of hardware accelerators. It's hard enough to find software that use multiple cores in an effective way or even the raw GPU power already available in many PCs.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 12-28-2012 07:35 PM
quote: Wolfgang Woehl
For bluray source an MPEG DCP is perfectly sufficient. asdcplib will process and wrap elementary streams and basically all systems in the field are able to play compositions with MPEG essence.
I don't really agree. Transcoding stuff from one lossy format to another will reduce your image quality, so it's always best to choose the least lossy alternative as your destination format.
Most Blu-Ray content is encoded in H.264, which usually has far less compression artifacts at the same bitrate as MPEG-2 does. So, if your source is H.264, your aim should really be JPEG2000, at least if you still give a bit about image quality.
If 2K is required as a final output and not 1080p, I also prefer to add some small amount of letter boxing instead of using a scaler, which will soften the image even further.
DVD is really a shitty source format for DCPs, primarily because of the interlaced nature of the content, but Blu-Ray is actually not that bad. I guess that not many people will really see the difference between a DCP produced from Blu-Ray v.s. a "genuine DCP" produced by some studio, especially if the former is done right.
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