Oppo BDP-83 .... - bluray disc player

[audiodelic]

Worth a read

Oppo BDP-83 Universal Blu-ray Player - Update — Reviews and News from Audioholics

comments ?
Now its just one thing that bothers me, the region coding punga ...... is this feasible for the indian market? what region blu rays are available in india anyone know ?

satish

 

[venkatcr]

I had explained about the Blu-Ray region coding system in the following link.

http://www.hifivision.com/surround-amplifiers-receivers/1823-ps3-price-india.html

India falls in Region C. We are always shunted off to the last row in all international matters, and it is really shame as we are the second largest producer of movies and music in the world. And this really has nothing to do with geography.

Producers are today a confused lot vis-a-vis region coding for Blu-ray. In addition they may want the format to succeed and thus nearly 70% of the BDs released are region free.

All Oppo players, since they are designed in the US will come preset for Region A. Knowing Oppo, I am sure they will provide a simple remote control based methodology to change the region code to anything you want. I don't think that will be an issue. It may even be the same method that are now there for all Oppo players.

BTW, for people in Chennai, Some shops in Burma Bazar are selling authentic looking BDs for between Rs.200 and Rs.250.

Shall some of start a BD distribution system for all members of HiFiVision? . That was just a joke moderator.

Cheers

 

[moserw]

Any idea when it would be released to the general public instead of just beta testers?

 

[audiodelic]

Venkat
I believe bypassing blu ray region coding is not as easy as dvd region coding and you need a mod chip hardware based solution.....

Can you shed some light on this ?

In your thread you say some Panasonic players come blu ray region free?
If a manufacturer is allowed to do this i bet Oppo will not shy away as they supported region free dvd in their old players.

 

[venkatcr]

In BD, region codes are controlled in two different ways - one for DB Players and the other for computers.

In BD Players, every BD Disc has a program that is triggered the minute you insert a disc. This checks with the player's region code. As long as the region codes in the disc and the player match, there will no issue. So I believe Oppo will give us a simple way to set and reset the player's region codes to match that of any disc. If a disc does not play the first time, you simply switch the code in the player to match the one in the disc, and reinsert the disc. . Hopefully this can be done ad infinitum.

On computers it works differently and is software based. The playback software manages the region code checking instead of the player. There are software available you can use to set or change the region code up to 5 times after initial configuration.

Yes region free players are available, and I am sure Oppo will also be capable of being made region free.

Let us keep our fingers crossed.

Cheers

 

[audiodelic]

thanks venkat great explanation as usual.

Oppo has enough sales around the world including parts of europe all the way to asia and australia. I know australian law mandates region free players.

I have also been following the Oppo BDP thread on avs and some people suggested maybe they would make dvd region free but Blu could be limited to region 1 N. America.

I hope Oppo see this market demand/trend and make a region free blu ray player.

 

[prakasse]

thanks venkat great explanation as usual.

Oppo has enough sales around the world including parts of europe all the way to asia and australia. I know australian law mandates region free players.

I have also been following the Oppo BDP thread on avs and some people suggested maybe they would make dvd region free but Blu could be limited to region 1 N. America.

I hope Oppo see this market demand/trend and make a region free blu ray player.

i read in a forum(avs i think) that oppo BD will not be region free... not sure though.

 

[audiodelic]

Bad news what we all dreaded ....

Hi,
I just wanted to know whether the blu ray player that Oppo plans to release will it support region free blu ray playback ?
I hope Oppo realizes that you cater to a worldwise market including india, asia, australia, europe so you will not leave us in the dark by releasing a region 1 blu ray player.

Satish,
Our BDP-83 Blu-ray player is being designed for North America, which is DVD Region 1 and Blu-ray Region A compliant. We have no plans selling these units internationally or allowing the end user to adjust any regional controls.

Best Regards,
Customer Service
OPPO Digital, Inc.

Hi,
Does Oppo have any future plans to release another model for international market with region free blu ray later on?

Satish,
OPPO Digital, Inc will be releasing only a North American model. OPPO Europe (OPPO.SE) will likely release an European model which will be DVD Region 2 and Blu-ray Region B compliant.


Best Regards,
Customer Service
OPPO Digital, Inc.

 

[venkatcr]

Satish:

Don't be too disheartened by this. That is the official line that Oppo has to take, if they have to avoid facing innumerable legal suits from Hollywood producers. One suit and all their plans could be jeopardized. There will be some idiot somewhere looking for a chance to pounce on Oppo since they are doing well.

If you look at the website, nowhere will it say that the 980, 981 or 983 can be made region free.

I had also written to Oppo when I was buying the 983. They did the same and wrote back to me saying no. By the time I had already placed the order and was dreading if I had just thrown away 400 odd dollars.

I then called the sales guys over phone, and asked them if the same codes that were there for 980 and 981 for making the player region free will work for 983 also. He said, 'Please don't quote me but it will.'

I will not be too surprised if the same codes work for the BD player also. Just wait till it is released, and I am sure the Net will be flooded with ways to make it region free.

Let us keep our fingers crossed. I have lot of faith in the cheekiness of the Chinese. Wow! that has a lot of rhyme to it - cheekiness of the Chinese.

Cheers

 

[bazee]

Venkatcr

for people in Chennai, Some shops in Burma Bazar are selling authentic looking BDs for between Rs.200 and Rs.250.

Shall some of start a BD distribution system for all members of HiFiVision? . That was just a joke moderator.

If such distribution system starts, i will be the first member.

Seriously, can we get BD at rs 200.... are they of same quality as orignal BDs. A movie BD if Singlelayer carries 25 GB of data while a dual layer BD carries 50 GB of data. It is difficult to "rip" it without loss of quality.

I think someone should buy the 200 rs BD and watch it. If they are at par wit a orig BD, we have struck gold!

Becos, when "copied" DVDs hit the market, with 3 in 1/6 in 1 movies on one DVD, the quality was serioulsy compromised. They just ripped the movie video and forget about DTS/HD coding etc..
An average new english movie DVD is of 8-9 GB in size and the guys ripped it all to 1 GB. Consider this the "best compression" standard of the industry.It was a rip off(literally and figurativley)

 

[venkatcr]

If such distribution system starts, i will be the first member.

Another member is buying a BD disc to check it you. Let me see. If the results are good, I will work out a plan.

Cheers

 

[audiodelic]

thanks to the australians

region free blu ray player with all the necessary feastures

Good Gear Guide - Kogan Technologies Blu-ray Player Full HD 1080P - Reviews - Hardware - Home Entertainment - High Definition Players

comments venkat

 

[venkatcr]

comments venkat

Well, the specs and the review sound promising. And the price is attractive too. At today's exchange rates it is only 11,500Rs in Australia. If the landed cost through an Indian distributor is 20K or less, it will be attractive.

I would love to know what technology they are using for scaling. That may be one feature that the Oppo BD83 will beat all other players irrespective of its price point. VRS is the reference point in the world today for scaling.

They seem to lack BD Profile 2.0, whatever that means. Got to read that up. It will be great if this product is reviewed by Secrets of HT or by one of us.

Sridhar (of Odyssey), does it make sense for you to start early and see if you can take Indian distributorship for this product? The company, Kogan Technologies, seems to be popular down under.

Cheers

 

[audiodelic]

Well, the specs and the review sound promising. And the price is attractive too. At today's exchange rates it is only 11,500Rs in Australia. If the landed cost through an Indian distributor is 20K or less, it will be attractive.

I would love to know what technology they are using for scaling. That may be one feature that the Oppo BD83 will beat all other players irrespective of its price point. VRS is the reference point in the world today for scaling.

They seem to lack BD Profile 2.0, whatever that means. Got to read that up. It will be great if this product is reviewed by Secrets of HT or by one of us.

Sridhar (of Odyssey), does it make sense for you to start early and see if you can take Indian distributorship for this product? The company, Kogan Technologies, seems to be popular down under.

Cheers

I believe theyre using some algorithm so i think its like the mediatek chip the earlier oppo used 970hd i think.

Profile 2.0 is for interactive online stuff not really an essential.

The only question is does it feature dts hd-ma decoding onboard.
It doesnt specify in its page per say ...

Blu-Ray Player 1080P Full HD, HDMI - Kogan Technologies Pty Ltd

 

[marsilians]

I would love to know what technology they are using for scaling. That may be one feature that the Oppo BD83 will beat all other players irrespective of its price point. VRS is the reference point in the world today for scaling.

I beg to differ with you Venkat though I am going by what i have read thus far. I have been reading a lot about BD players and have held off until they fix the audio processing issues across the board.

The high end audio/video philes (I hate very few things in life but these terms are in the short list) rate the Reon HQV to outperform the Anchor Bay VRS. This is from people who are early adopters as well as experts in the evaluation of video processing chips.

Also one glaring omission I found on the photos from Oppo site is that the BD players dont support DVD-Audio. This is a bummer for me as I have a decent collection of this format of some classics.

bolmsted/oppo - Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

photo no. 10 shows the gap.

They seem to lack BD Profile 2.0, whatever that means.

Profile 2.0 is also called BD-Live. This means that the BD players have to have 2 things as standard:

Ethernet connection - While most of the newer ones have this they are only used for firmware updates. The 2.0 players use this to download HD content for viewing.

Minimum 1 GB of harddrive space : This is to store the downloaded content to watch.

As any standardization process, these are under constant review and may change the parameters though not the above requirements.

 

[marsilians]

The only question is does it feature dts hd-ma decoding onboard.
It doesnt specify in its page per say ...

No player does this - not even the USD 3500 Denon Universal Player nor the Pioneer.

Oppo has "promised" to have this at the time of release of the product but only time will tell. Their quote

""The player will support the transportation and decoding of the Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Digital TrueHD, DTS High Resolution, and DTS HD-Master. In the current implementation only the core DD and DTS are supported, but the hardware will support the transportation and decoding of these formats in the future."

So don't put up your SD DVDs and CDs for sale yet.

Also the pricing is between USD 499 and 599. This is way higher than PS3, Samsung and Sony players. But Oppo has never been the cheapest and delivers the best bang for the buck feature and customer service wise.

 

[audiodelic]

So the PS3 is the only player with DTS - MA decoding onboard ?
Btw by decoding i mean decodes it and sends it out LPCM via HDMI not analogue outs ....

 

[venkatcr]

I beg to differ with you Venkat though I am going by what i have read thus far. I have been reading a lot about BD players and have held off until they fix the audio processing issues across the board. The high end audio/video philes (I hate very few things in life but these terms are in the short list) rate the Reon HQV to outperform the Anchor Bay VRS. This is from people who are early adopters as well as experts in the evaluation of video processing chips.

What you say could very well be true. I am also going by what I have read. Last year, when Secrets Of HT were reviewing the Oppo 981, they were literally pleading with Oppo to introduce a product with VRS technology. And the 983 ended up getting 100 marks in their tests. The only product to do so. But then all Oppo products have been between 90 and 100 with the Benchmark tests. I think they are way ahead of all other budget DVD makers in implementing technology.

The difference between Silicon Optix's Reon/HQV and Anchor Bay's VRS will most probably a small factor in one of the dozen or so tasks that they perform. I have both at home, and honestly I cannot make out any difference. Obviously the DVD is better than a TV signal, but this more a factor of the source reliability. I also feel sometimes the Oppo is quicker and better in resolving jaggies and pixelisation, but again this may be because it is closer to the source. And it is just my opinion.

What Oppo and Anchor Bay have done successfully is to bring high end technology down to the masses. If you look at the users of VRS, it is predominantly AVRs and DVD Players from companies such as Esoteric/TEAC, Marantz, Denon, and Yamaha. Reon/HQV is used more in expensive projectors, and BD Players from companies such as Marantz, Epson, NEC, Toshiba, etc.

This October, Silicon Optix has been bought out by IDT. I do hope that they do better, and do not gather cobwebs in the large number of products that IDT has. That will be a shame.

Also one glaring omission I found on the photos from Oppo site is that the BD players dont support DVD-Audio. This is a bummer for me as I have a decent collection of this format of some classics.

Maybe Oppo did not have enough space to print the DVD-A logo. I think these photographs were shot during this year's CES. In any case we are just a few weeks away when Oppo will be releasing the product. I do hope, like the codes for making the product region free, Oppo does not skip something relatively simple as the DVD-A. After all they already have the technology with them.

Cheers

 

[marsilians]

Apparently there are some technical issues in supporting DVD-A along with BD. This and DTS-MA support may not be there in the first batch that comes out though its is expected to be fixed in a later firmware update.

At this point, I have put a wait time of 18 months to buy this device (6 months to fix, 12 months to remove all kinks and get 1 or 2 other firmware upgrades). I don't expect the prices to fall but thats not my criteria. Also its hard to get BD disks in India (Chor or Burma bazaar ones are actually dual layer DVDs with stampings). An actual BD disk can hold upto 25GB.

 

[venkatcr]

It looks as if Oppo has released some news (very sp****, I am afraid) on the BDP 83.

It looks as if it will be a universal player that includes Profile 2.0 Blu-ray, SACD, DVD and DVD-Audio, as well as CD. For SACD it will support DSD over HDMI and DSD-to-analog without any PCM conversion.

Now if only they make it truly universal with a region hack !!

Please check out

Oppo Releases Specs for their BDP-83 Universal Blu-ray Player-AVRev.com

I think mid 2009 will be a good season for us Indians who want Blu-Ray. It might be worthwhile to start collecting BD discs on our travels abroad.

Cheers