Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Multi Region Bluray player

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Posted by Michael Sharples (Member # 8905) on 07-05-2015, 07:59 AM:

Just wondering if anyone can recommend a good quality multi region bluray player.

Posted by Ian Freer (Member # 1940) on 07-05-2015, 09:15 AM:

Here in NZ the Oppo's are available with an optional hardware mod that lets you select the region via a sequence of buttons on the remote.
You can turn off the OSD on them now, and the second HDMI out is useful for cueing things up with the douser closed on the PJ...

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 07-05-2015, 10:31 AM:

The modified Oppo is the only multi-region BR player that I have seen (it works fine). Are there others?

For the last couple of years (at least), the Oppos have been the only BR players worth buying for cinema use. And I say this as one who believes very strongly that, outside of the occasional rental, BR (and other consumer formats) has no place in cinema exhibition.

Posted by Harold Hallikainen (Member # 5405) on 07-05-2015, 11:28 AM:

How does the Oppo do on audio decoding? Will it decode out to 8 channels of PCM on HDMI?

Harold

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 07-05-2015, 11:37 AM:

Not sure. Most places just use the 6-channel analog output into the cinema processor's external 6-channel input.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 07-05-2015, 11:39 AM:

Oppo has everything. 8-channels of analog (or mix-down to what you have), PCM on HDMI or leaves the decoding up to your A/V receiver (your choice), Coax/Toslink can have either PCM or bitstream, your choice.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 07-05-2015, 12:44 PM:

When I looked into this, the Oppo machines cost $500-800 depending on options.

The last time I was over in England visiting relatives, I bought a couple of £50 region 2/B Samsung players (one of each of our theaters) and took them back with me. Should we ever need to play a region C disc I'll probably make a region-free copy using DVDFab. It hasn't happened yet, and unless we do something like a month long festival of Australian movies, all of them on BD, we're never likely to show enough of them for the time and blank media cost of doing this to become a problem.

The British Samsungs get quite intensive use, not so much because of region B BDs, but because our region 1/A Panasonics will not play PAL DVDs. Yes, I know that showing 576i DVDs on a theater screen is, as a character in a Tarantino movie might put it, "pretty f***ing far from ideal," but the programmers do ask us to regularly.

I'm not sure if the shipping cost involved in ordering a player from amazon.co.uk (or anyone else, for that matter) would be high enough that buying an Oppo here would be worth it, but if you are going, or know anyone, going over for a visit to Europe and/or Asia, this would be a relatively low-cost way of getting hold of region B and C players.

Posted by Michael Sharples (Member # 8905) on 07-05-2015, 01:02 PM:

I agree that BR and DVD are not cinema formats but you'd be supprised (or maybe not) how many times distributors send them to us for screening, we even someimes have to buy our own and pay them to show it!! And the film festival we do use them a fair bit as well.

The Oppo does look like a nice piece of kit, if expensive. As a single screen art house cinema budgets can be a bit....tight. I'll run it past the person with the purse strings but we may be looking to spend a bit less.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 07-05-2015, 01:54 PM:

Yup, BDs are a regular fixture at festivals, especially the second-tier ones that have a lot of "kid with a Mac" first-time entrants. The drawbacks of using a consumer format for professional presentation simply aren't on their radar: audio channels that won't play, decode and/or route properly, pixel aspect ratios that end up wrong unless player, scaler and/or projector default settings are overridden, fingerprints on discs causing them to glitch and stutter, subtitles that don't appear unless you wade through multiple menus (sometimes in a foreign language) to enable them, menus with sound making it difficult to present the show without any menu content playing to the house, 1-2 minute pauses between movies in shows consisting of multiple shorts shown from multiple discs (the wait while they boot and then the FBI death threat appears for 20 seconds), etc. etc. Most of those can be worked around when testing the disc before the show, but someone who hasn't worked a booth tends not to understand, and in some cases not even accept, that it's not as simple as inserting the disc and pressing play, like it is in their living room.

I've suggested to the director of one of our festivals that comes back every year that for next year's event, he accepts DCPs as the only allowable digital format. There are now several free packages that make them (plus a basic but functional plugin built into Adobe CC), and using them should not be any problem to anyone who can work out how to author and burn a BD. I suspect it's only a matter of time before the better run fests start to take this line, but that still leaves art/rep venues that do seasons of, say, French gangster films or Soviet musicals having to show the odd one on a consumer-published DVD or BD in cases where neither a print nor a DCP is available. Annoying as they are, I fear that optical discs will be a regular annoyance in the booth for some time yet.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 07-05-2015, 05:10 PM:

Leo...once you use an Oppo...you'll never want to use anything else. Right down to the adjustable subtitle position and the ability to nix the on-screen menus. Good things generally do cost more. We don't sell them for being region free...we are Oppo dealers and cannot sell them as anything other than region 1/A. Now there are various "kits" out there that can convert them into multi-region. There is a disc that will turn it into region-0 but the BD part does require a degree of hardware to overcome.

Posted by Jonathan Goeldner (Member # 4854) on 07-05-2015, 08:27 PM:

I like my Sherman BDP-5004, but if you hook it to the internet it disables the region free setting.

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 07-07-2015, 03:22 AM:

I did think of trying to get a better player, somebody seems to have bought the cheapest one they could find which doesn't even have an audio output, but Blu-Ray is pretty much dead now; the last one we ran was over six months ago. We recently had a private hire by somebody to run 'Leave To Remain'; they were offered DCP and Blu-Ray, we took the Blu-Ray as a backup, but didn't need to use it. We ran about six films from Blu-Ray in the early days, mainly for films where the distributor wouldn't talk to us unless we put up a large bond, so we used Blu-Ray with a Filmbank licence. These days I think all distributors are talking to us, and supplying DCPs. As far as I am concerned, Blu-Ray is a pain, partly because of the audio problems, and partly because of HDCP.

While Blu-Ray is almost dead, DVD is increasing. We have only ever shown two of our own films in this format, and oddly enough they were consecutive ones, however, a lot of organisations hire the cinema from the council, and many of these use DVD. This includes the local police who are screening a series on policing London which is showing on the BBC at the moment, they screen each episode a day or two after it is transmitted, with audience discussion afterwards. The discs come from the BBC, but seem to have been produced by somebody else, and the quality is poor, the countdown clock on the beginning looks like VHS quality, and the programme itself is not much better. Most of the DVDs which we show now are from various film-making groups screening their own work, this has recently included two local primary schools and a group for young people with learning difficulties. The DVD player is old, but good quality, a Marantz DV4610, and the picture quality is as good as you could reasonably expect from SD video. It has the ability to select bitstream or PCM output separately for each sound format, so we set to to output PCM from MPEG layer 2 tracks. We do still get these on discs produced with some of the cheaper software packages. Of course this is limited to two channels, but I've only ever seen two discs with MPEG multi-channel audio, and they were very early ones.

Posted by Burleigh Ibbott (Member # 3917) on 07-07-2015, 07:43 AM:

We Have a Sony multi region player which works great. The only problem we have it that it does not have a display on the front of the unit. So you are not sure how much time you have on each film playing.

Posted by Jim Cassedy (Member # 4115) on 07-07-2015, 09:03 AM:

quote:
The drawbacks of using a consumer format for professional presentation simply aren't on their radar: - - etc, etc

Oh, geeze, Leo- - after the last 'amateur' festival I got stuck doing, I was
ready to write an entire book of how NOT do do a 'film' festival, and most of
my griping had to do with home-made blu-rays & dvds.

One of my pet peeves is people who don't understand that just because you've
dumped a video file to a disk that says DVD or BluRay on it- - that DOES NOT
AUTOMATICALLY MAKE IT A DVD or BLU-RAY.

One festival producer said he was going to 'save me a lot of work' by editing
all the shorts programs onto blu-ray disks. And he did. But to save money
he used LTH (instead of HTL) type disks which woudln't play in any of the
blu-ray players I had available at the venue. I didn't even know you could
still buy LTH type disks. But apparently you can if you are cheap enough.

(I'm not even sure an OPPO will playback LTH type disks)

The last event I did which had a lot of blu-ray & dvd content, I just dumped
all the content into an extra MacBook Pro I had sitting at home and then
ran the shows with "Playback Pro", which enabled me to make some basic
corrections to aspect ratios, plus video & audio levels on a clip basis, and
even allows me to program which clips run consecutively and which clips
need pauses between them for intros or Q&A's.

It took a little extra work on my part, but it saved a lot of 'head banging'
during the actual shows.

I think I spent around $400 initially on the Playback Pro program, but
I later upgraded it to a $600 version that has a few more bells & whistles.

IMO it was worth every penny.

Fortunately, at most of the venues I get stuck doing 'amateur' events at,
I also have an OPPO available, and those are definitely worth the money too.

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 07-07-2015, 09:30 AM:

Oppo 103 - about £600. Oppo 105 - just over £1,000 That's about $1,500; it ought to be good at that price.

I've had several problems with 'home made' Blu-Rays, more so than with DVDs.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 07-07-2015, 12:12 PM:

The BDP-105 is probably a bit excessive for cinema use. The chief price difference is due to the superior D/A converters in the 105. There is also a stereo mixdown as well as multi-channel and the stereo is available as an XLR output. BDP-105D is $1,299.00 direct from Oppo though we have cinema pricing for US customers. The BDP-103 is $499.00 direct from Oppo with similar Cinema pricing from us.

-Steve

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 07-08-2015, 12:01 AM:

quote: Stephen Furley
Oppo 103 - about £600. Oppo 105 - just over £1,000 That's about $1,500; it ought to be good at that price.

Most of the differential between the US prices being quoted by Steve being VAT (sales tax). In Britain it's 20%. Lifelong Californians complain about the sales tax here (between 7-9%, depending on the county and city sales taxes) being high relative to the rest of the US, but compared to Europe it's a positive bargain!

quote: Jim Cassedy
Oh, geeze, Leo- - after the last 'amateur' festival I got stuck doing, I was ready to write an entire book of how NOT do do a 'film' festival, and most of my griping had to do with home-made blu-rays & dvds.

We have a mix of high end, professional fests (e.g. AFI and TCM), for which nothing enters our booth until it's been thoroughly tested and inspected by a dedicated team hired by the fest itself, and which is almost all 35mm and studio-made DCPs, to fests which have a lot of amateur and, shall we say, "early career professional" shows, which embody all the nightmares you describe, to which I could add a few more.

One of my favorites this year was the gay and lesbian fest back in the spring. One of their shows came on a Swank BD. It was factory pressed, but I suspect for the rental market, because it had 14 minutes of trailers that played immediately on insertion, followed by several copyright violation death penalty threat slides, and finally the menu (with loud music blaring over the menu, of course). The disc was authored such that the pre-menu crap could not be skipped. And this movie had to be played after only a 7-minute turnaround from the previous show! In the end I ripped it using DVDFab and created a copy that just had the feature program on it. Given the equipment we had in the booth, it was the only solution available that worked.

I'd love a Mac with Playback Pro on it, because high bitrate ProRes files are rapidly becoming the delivery format of choice for these "semi-professional" shows, alongside BDs.

Interestingly, my experience has been different from Stephen's. At the fests and shorts shows I do, the BD has now pretty much totally taken over from the DVD for optical discs. I'd say that probably only one disc in 7 or 8 I get now is a DVD.

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 07-08-2015, 02:46 PM:

My recent experience is similar to Leo's--I haven't seen a DVD for public screening in a while, except as a backup for a Blu-Ray. I don't generally deal with high-profile festivals, but the better-run ones that I do work with all want 35mm, DCP, or HDCAM, all of which are reliable, professional formats.

DCP can be weird because people do not understand it, although that is improving slowly. I have more than once been given a flash drive containing an MP4 or Quicktime file and told that it was a DCP. Another common one is valid DCPs delivered on disks or flash drives formatted as HFS (for the Mac), which some, but not all, cinema servers will read, which leads to people complaining that "it worked at the last theatre." The good news is that unkeyed DCPs seem to be increasing in popularity for festivals, eliminating at least one major potential source of unreliabilty.

What seems to be on the rise is people who want to screen various non-DCP file formats. In principle, this could be a good thing if everyone standardized on one format that played reliably (preferably in a hardware playback device). The practical problem is that there is no standard and the festivals that accept these formats all have different requirements. Apple Pro Res 422 played on an Aja Ki-Pro is my preference here, but the file format for this device is very specific. Unless the content is actually recorded using a Ki-Pro, it often takes several attempts to get a playable copy of the movie. (The most common error here is soundtracks formatted as AAC and not PCM; the picture will play fine, but the sound will be static.) Even this setup does not handle a mix of frame rates particularly well, and the Ki-Pro does not do 3:2 pulldown for 23.98 material (a nonissue for D-cinema projectors, but a potential problem for some monitors and nonprofessional video projectors).

Posted by Stephen Furley (Member # 1277) on 07-08-2015, 04:07 PM:

There's a major difference between DCP and just about any previous professional format. Very few people would have the means to create their own 35 mm, or even 16 mm film print, the same goes for 2 inch Quad or IVC 9000, 1 inch 'B' or 'C' format, Beta SP, D1, D2, DCT, D3, D5, Digi Beta, HD Cam, or whatever the upgraded version of it is called, etc. Anybody can make a DCP, using nothing more than a laptop. It may not be fast, but it's easy to do, and if you do it properly it's pretty much universal. I really can't understand why anybody making a film today, including students etc., doesn't make their work available as a DCP. Nor can I understand, as in another thread, why producers and distributors of 'proper' films, intended to be seen in cinemas, produce trailers for them, but don't make a DCP available, and point exhibitors to a YouTube or Vimeo download.

The only real disadvantage that I can see to a DCP is the time which it takes to ingest.

quote:
Most of the differential between the US prices being quoted by Steve being VAT (sales tax). In Britain it's 20%. Lifelong Californians complain about the sales tax here (between 7-9%, depending on the county and city sales taxes) being high relative to the rest of the US, but compared to Europe it's a positive bargain!

I'm not sure if the UK prices I quoted include VAT or not, but even if they do, the 103 at £600 is about $900. Adding 20% to Steve's US price of $499 only brings it up to $600, so even allowing for VAT, the UK price seems to be about 50% higher than the U.S. One would be if the tax rate was the same there.

Posted by Michael Sharples (Member # 8905) on 07-08-2015, 04:40 PM:

We've been beeen receiving on average one dvd/Bluray for screening every couple of weeks, a lot of documentary films and kids films seem to come in that format. If we get them far enough in advannce then we convert them to DCP. Is DVDfab worth the money? I've been using MakeMKV alongside Handbrake to rip the content, curious as to how others are doing it.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 07-08-2015, 05:45 PM:

quote: Scott Norwood
I have more than once been given a flash drive containing an MP4 or Quicktime file and told that it was a DCP. Another common one is valid DCPs delivered on disks or flash drives formatted as HFS (for the Mac), which some, but not all, cinema servers will read, which leads to people complaining that "it worked at the last theatre." The good news is that unkeyed DCPs seem to be increasing in popularity for festivals, eliminating at least one major potential source of unreliabilty.

This mirrors my recent experience precisely. Our DSS200s will read DCPs on HFS and HFS+ volume, but only if it has a MBR partition table, not a GPT one, and only if the DCP files are in the top folder or one level down. So most of these DCP drives won't work, and I have either to ingest the DCPs through the network (takes a long time), or copy them to an NTFS or ext3 volume first (saves time compared to FTP/LAN ingestion for DCPs bigger than around 20-25GB).

On the ingestion time issue, I so wish that Dolby would make a replacement for the cat915z (front panel USB board for the DSS200) that enables USB3. Most of the flash sticks being sold now are USB3 ones, and increasingly I'm getting kids with Macs providing their DCPs on the bigger (64 and 128GB) ones. I supsect that when 256GB flash sticks enter widespread circulation (they're already available, though pigfuckingly expensive as yet), we'll start to see Technicolor and Deluxe use them - they'll be small enough to send through the regular mail and therefore they'll save a huge amount of shipping costs. Ingestion at USB3 speeds would be a huge help, especially for an arthouse/rep venue such as ours, which have a large number of DCPs flowing through the booth.

quote: Michael Sharples
Is DVDfab worth the money?

It doesn't do anything that absolutely cannot be done with free software (that I'm aware of), but it makes the job much easier and quicker.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 07-09-2015, 07:56 AM:

Since the DSS200 is now discontinued, I don't think you'll see a USB3 hardware change. I think the problem would be that the motherboard doesn't have USB3 ports. There isn't any active chips/semis on the CAT914...it just has the passive ports, LEDs and the hidden power switch.

However, what I've heard from the CRU Dataport people is the possibility of a USB3 ingest converter in the works.

They have done a less-complicated one for those that have a combo USB/eSTATA port where the front of the CRU frame has both the CRU slot and a USB3 connector such that it will work with both on those combo jacks without having to unplug/replug anything.

Posted by Fernando Caldeira (Member # 5680) on 07-13-2015, 06:28 AM:

We do mostly Festivals here and we get everything from DVDs to BRs MP4 to QT. We got a system going were we invested on 3 computers with BR drives, instaled DCP-o-Matic,DVD-Fab and DiskInternals Linux Reader in all of them and we do DCPs out of everything we get.
It´s hard work when we get 60 or 70 (mostly shorts) to convert but its worth it!!!! Specialy when we get low quality files..some how DCP makes everything look better and smoother...