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Comment by illumin8 | Hacker News Reader

The experience on Blu-Ray is terrible. I have to sit through as much as 20 minutes of unskippable commercials before I get to the menu screen. They even show you commercials about how great movies are on Blu-Ray - even though they should know you already are a customer because you're watching a Blu-Ray. Not only that, some of the commercials are streamed over the Internet, which means they use your bandwidth without asking permission to download an unskippable commercial.

The experience is getting a bit ridiculous, and I personally hope someone writes a DeCSS for Blu-Ray so that we can uncripple this format.

Btw, I don't actually buy any Blu-Ray disks, I just have my Netflix account enabled for Blu-Ray and watch most movies in that format since it looks better on my HDTV.

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I personally hope someone writes a DeCSS for Blu-Ray so that we can uncripple this format.

I've been using AnyDVD HD for a few years, but I have not had a Blu-Ray reader or writer until a couple of days ago and I have no Blu-Ray discs yet (Netflix, hurry up!). AnyDVD works great on DVDs and claims to work with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD formatted content. It's not free, unfortunately, but it's supposed to uncripple the format.

And before I get to far: I'm not a pirate, my use of AnyDVD HD is simple: I have a single SageTV Media Server (HTPC/DVR software) and I use extenders to play all of my video content on three televisions (meaning my TVs have one tiny low-power box yet all of my TVs can play a DVD or watch recorded content and live TV from my noisy HTPC tucked away in a rack in my basement). Without AnyDVD, I can't put a DVD in the basement server and play it on an extender upstairs. I was hoping to do the same with my new Blu-Ray player.

I think the problem with Blu-Ray, and AnyDVD has this issue as well, is that every disc has a slightly modified copy protection scheme that requires additional hacking to make a copy of it. I believe this requires a company like Slysoft, that makes AnyDVD, to constantly release updates for every new movie that is released.

For this reason, I doubt we'll ever see a public domain solution like DeCSS arrive. It's too bad.

... and Slysoft releases new versions about as often as the folks who write No Script do. Thankfully, for a while, they had a lifetime upgrade policy.

The funny thing is that I would have been a Blu-Ray early adopter if I didn't see this mess coming. I can't believe my parents purchased a player before I did.

To be slightly fair (and only slightly because I still think Blu-Ray sucks), Netflix does often get separate rental copies of movies that differ from the store-bought versions. They usually have more extraneous crap in front of the movie, since they are making less money off them in the long run.

But the load times alone make me want to throw my Blu-Ray player out of the window. It's a mind-numbingly slow experience in every way.

The load time with my old Sony Blu-Ray player was the same -- horribly slow. Unusable, IMHO.

Then I got a PlayStation 3. It made the kids happy and is radically faster playing Blu-Ray discs. If you're not a gamer be sure to get the optional "normal" bluetooth remote and you'll be all set.

I have a ps3 as well and most of my experiences with bluray have been pretty much the same as dvd with the exception of terminator 2 (skynet edition I think) which took forever to load.

The real problem is that I can't see much of a difference between the dvd version of a movie and the bluray version, if I have a choice for the same price I probably will buy bluray but otherwise the dvd upscaling works just as well for me.

This experience of quality differs greatly than that of a regular xvid rip and a hidef h264 rip which are actually quite noticeable.

The load times on my Sony PS3 are not that bad... But, I once had a Blu-Ray ask me if I wanted to download an update to it, and I was forced to download the update before I was able to watch the movie.

I think the bottom line is that Sony and the Blu-Ray disk manufacturers are treating our player devices like they own them. This is the same kind of thinking that caused the Sony Rootkit fiasco. What would people do if they found out that a Blu-Ray update caused their player to start reporting every movie they watched to a server (it probably already does)?

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