Video Asylum

TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Home Theater systems and more.

Use this form to submit comments directly to the Asylum moderators for this forum. We're particularly interested in truly outstanding posts that might be added to our FAQs.
You may also use this form to provide feedback or to call attention to messages that may be in violation of our content rules.

You must login to use this feature.

Inmate Login

By default, logging in will set a session cookie that disappears when you close your browser. Clicking on the 'Remember my Moniker & Password' below will cause a permanent 'Login Cookie' to be set.

Moniker/Username: The Name that you picked or by default, your email. Forgot Moniker?	Examples "Rapper", "Bob W", "joe@aol.com".
Password:	Forgot Password?
	Remember my Moniker & Password ( What's this?)

If you don't have an Asylum Account, you can create one by clicking Here.

Our privacy policy can be reviewed by clicking Here.

Inmate Comments

From:
Your Email:
Subject:

Message Comments

Original Message

The necessity of good firmware support

Posted by Jazz Inmate on April 10, 2008 at 13:20:51:
In this age of changing specs and of formats constantly coming and going, software/firmware support is essential. Most companies do not do a good job of providing it. For example, my Tivo Series 3, which is supposed to deliver HD broadcasts in their native resolution, is now worthless. When I try to feed it high def broadcasts, it hangs, shows bad compression artifacts and then goes dead. It often has problems with standard definition broadcasts, although I can usually get it working. I have made Tivo aware of the problem and was promised the issue would be escalated to their engineers. Supposedly new software will be uploaded to my Tivo, but so far nothing. I'm not holding my breath. Meanwhile watching TV has become a PITA and I've simply given up watching HDTV broadcasts altogether as it bombs my Tivo.

On the other end of the spectrum, Sony's software/firmware support of the PS3 is absolutely phenomenal. Before I even cared about whether the PS3 was Blu-ray 1.1 or 2.0 compliant, Sony had upgraded the PS3 to be a 2.0 BD player. The only outstanding issue is DTS-HD MA decoding and now it looks like Sony will offer a firmware update on April 15 that does exactly that! I couldn't ask for better support or a more future-proof BD player. I still don't much care about the picture-in-picture or online features, but the lack of DTS-HD MA support was starting to bother me because it was being used on more titles. But as of next week, the PS3 will be able to handle all BD content that any studio throws at it--including all the high bitrate audio formats. I couldn't be happier.
-------------
Call it, friendo.