Bloggers are wrong for calling the Avatar Blu-ray a defective...
Bloggers are wrong for calling the Avatar Blu-ray a defective product or blaming any playback problems on bad authoring or DRM, Fox Home Entertainment executive Danny Kaye told us in an e-mail. “I don’t speak for bloggers, but it’s just…
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as with all new BD titles, there is the need for consumers to make sure they have the latest firmware updates for their players,” Kaye said. “It’s not a new issue as some would appear to be saying on the blogs. If there were playability issues, it’s not due to Avatar; it’s the case of the CE player not being up to date. To my knowledge, as of today nearly all CE manufacturers are now up to date on their latest firmware updates for nearly all models, and more and more consumers are keeping their players up to date. When they do that, BD titles will play on those players.” Panasonic Hollywood Lab, which authored the Avatar disc, called it “the first Blu-ray release from a major studio to be produced without special features, trailers or promotional content, freeing up the maximum disc storage for the film and corresponding menu to ensure the best possible video and audio representation of James Cameron’s spectacular world of Pandora.” It begged the question of whether there'll be enough capacity on a single 50-GB disc to accommodate Avatar when it’s released in Blu-ray 3D. “We'll certainly deliver a high-quality experience when the time comes,” Kaye responded. “But for now, we're just dealing with the 2D, which I'm sure you'll agree is pretty spectacular. We'll look at the issues from all angles.” One “potential downside” of putting 3D on a Blu-ray disc is that it saps storage capacity, a Panasonic white paper said last summer (CED Sept 4 p1).