The Players: Panasonic DMP-BD30 ($500) and Sony PlayStation 3 with 2.1 firmware ($400 to $500)
The Movies: Fox's Sunshine and Sony Pictures' Resident Evil: Extinction
The Challenge: To find out what's so special about Blu-ray's BD Profile 1.1, also known as Full Standard Profile or just simply "Picture-In-Picture Enabled"
Every new phase of technology has its first few tentative steps. Not only is Blu-ray in its earliest stage, but that stage seems to be subdivided into a few mini-stages. As we talked about in The State of Blu-ray, most Blu-ray players today are Profile 1.0, which means they play Blu-ray movies (usually).
The two above are currently available with Profile 1.1, with several more, such as Samsung's BD-UP5000 and Denon's DVD 3800BDCI, on the way. This profile is characterized by picture-in-picture—and at the moment nothing else.
The final profile is often referred to as 2.0, though the requirement is simply BD Live, that is, an Ethernet port that allows internet connectivity for downloading bonus content. There are currently no players that fit this description on the market.
This week, we decided to take a pre-CES look at Blu-ray 1.1. The movies are cool enough—who doesn't like a sci-fi thriller by the guy who made 28 Days Later? And can you even be on Gizmodo if you don't think Milla Jovovich is some kind of supreme being? But the movies' status as the next phase in Blu-ray evolution seems to be an embarrassment for the studios. Rather than champion the 1.1 players and the discs' new capabilities, they celebrate them in the finest of print sizes:
For first attempts, the "enhanced viewing" is not bad: In the 1980s, picture-in-picture was a lame concept created to convince wives that the football games could go on in the corner while the soap opera took up 85% of the screen, but that never actually happened. Now picture-in-picture has been reborn as something far more useful, where you can watch a movie while seeing the shots the director saw before special effects came into play, or the sketches that became the sets, or the faces of the commenters as they goof on their faulty stunts.
The Sunshine disc handles PIP with a shiny golden console screen that pops up to contain the standard-def bonus commentary. There aren't many segments, but what is shown, such as walkthroughs of the sets and shoting in zero-gravity, is cool to see juxtaposed with the final film.
In the end, we were glad that Blu-ray could now do what we've already seen in Warner HD DVDs such as 300 and the latest Harry Potter. PIP may yet be a wondrous tool. But we're a little puzzled by two things:
1) It's hard to believe that $1,000+ players from Pioneer and Sony Electronics can't do what these were able to do so easily.
2) If this is all possible, why does it take so long to just complete the damn profile and make all players capable of both picture-in-picture interactivity and online connectivity?
If I had to lay money down on one Blu-ray-only player at this minute, I'd have to choose the PS3. The jury is still out on the dual-format players we want to love best, but the early rumblings suggest they may need some work. And any standalone Blu-ray player without an Ethernet jack may be in danger of obsolescence in a few years, if not a matter of months.We'll personally be looking into all of that... right after CES. In the meantime, stay tuned for big Blu-ray and HD DVD announcements at the show!Source- http://gizmodo.com/340402/first-blu+ray-bd-profile-11-review-verdict-is-that-all
We thought Brando had finally reached the pinnacle of jokey USB armaments with its recent wireless missile launcher -- the third such product in this evolving line -- but apparently there is demand out there for a remotely-operated version capable of waging war over the internet. Filling this strange market gap will be the USB MSN Missile Launcher, which tacks a webcam onto the standard version and allows your buddies on the Microsoft network to randomly shoot at you throughout the day.
