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New Study Finds Low Interest In Blu-ray
PHPNerd writes "A new consumer survey recently released chronicles the woes of the winner of the hi-definition format war: nobody wants it. While consumers were very happy to embrace the DVD standard when it came about because it brought a huge jump in quality over VHS, the pros of switching to Blu-ray are not as obvious. From the article: 'In contrast, while half of the respondents to our survey rated Blu-ray's quality as 'much better' than standard DVD, another 40% termed it only 'somewhat better,' and most are very satisfied with the performance of their current DVD players." Another reason cited was that a Blu-ray investment also dictates an HDTV purchase, something consumers are reluctant to do.'" Maybe it's also that line-doubling DVD players can be had for less than a hundred dollars.
I don't think you're on-target here. That is the classic use of the term "line-doubler," which is why the DVD players in question don't usually call themselves that. They're usually called "upconverting."
In this case, they're not deinterlacing a signal--i.e. combining an every-other-line-per-frame signal into an every-line-per-frame signal. Instead, they're interpolating a higher resolution signal from a lower resolution one. Specifically, they're taking a 640x480 signal up to a 1280x720 or 1920x1080 signal. That may include deinterlacing as well, if the original signal's interlaced and the output's progressive. And it's true that progressive-scan players also deinterlace. Nobody would call them line-doublers though, I don't think.
Thing is, your HD TV does this as well, assuming it takes a 480i/p signal. It has to in order to display that signal at the TV's native resolution of 720p, 1080i, or 1080p.
So the question of whether an upconverting player makes a damned bit of difference comes down to this: Who has the better upconverting algorithm, the TV or the player?
If you have a great TV and a crappy player, it's possible an upconverting player can hurt your picture, not help it. In that case, run the lower-res signal to the TV and let the TV upconvert. This is similar to how, in the early 90s, sometimes it was better to run composite video instead of S-Video from your Laserdisc player to your TV, because your TV did a better job of comb filtering than the player did.
My basic take on upconverters, assuming your TV isn't made by Coby or similar, is that if you get them for free in the DVD player, awesome. If not, don't waste your money.
Regarding DVDs, my experience is that most film-original DVDs aren't interlaced, and most/all video-original DVDs are.
Blame Hollyweird's obsession with DRM protection on their movies for that. The Blu-ray players have to do a shitload of self-authentication against internal keys, check for signs of tampering, and load the goddamn stupid JVM before you can view your movie.
*curses whoever thought a JVM was a good idea for an embedded consumer device*
The delay from pressing the 'on' button to getting something on the screen was a big issue when I was working with a certain consumer electronics company on the firmware, but it was very difficult to reduce it further because of all the required DRM/anti-tampering crap. The actual embedded kernel boots very quickly.
---dragoness
HDMI doesn't support closed captions (in the Line-21 sense), because on HDMI, there is no "Line 21" or overscan signalling for closed captioning at all. HDMI is just a lightly modified version of DVI (slightly more robust signalling, but otherwise identical save the connector and digital audio).
The only captioning available via HDMI is that produced by the source - e.g. high-def TiVos generate captioning over the video source before outputting it over HDMI, and DVDs/Blu-Ray (and HD-DVD) offer standard subtitling support. The annoyance comes from the fact that MPEG-2 has an actual transport for line-21 captions, but the studio masters don't make DVD subtitle overlays with the same content. (New DVDs tend to have it as overlays - you'll see it as "English SDH" under subtitles, rather than as part of line-21 MPEG captions, but old DVDs don't, and it's annoying). Alas, most players don't have caption generators to overlay the caption text prior to output via HDMI.
Also, there's only one Blu-Ray player on the market that's worth getting (the Playstation 3), partly due to HD-DVD having forced Blu-Ray's hand in releasing players before technology had matured enough to make HD-DVD features affordable in Blu-Ray players. And unfortunately, the PS3 doesn't integrate nicely into a home theatre (lack of consumer IR being the big issue, so you can't use your fancy universal remote).