Panasonic DMP-BD10 Blu-ray player

[Matt]

[url=http://www.missingremote.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=973&Itemid=1&mosmsg=Item%20successfully%20saved.]Original Article Link[/url]
Aren’t these the same guys that were all hung up on HDMI 1.3 being in the next gen Samsung player, when HDMI 1.3 really offers little to no value. I see they are up to it again in this review, getting all pissy the Panasonic uses HDMI 1.2. They seem to think that HDMI 1.3 is needed for TrueHD/DTS-HD MA.
[quote]The DMP-BD10 does not support the lossless Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD Master Audio formats, though Panasonic will offer a firmware upgrade for Dolby TrueHD later this month.
But given that the deck’s HDMI 1.2 output isn’t able to carry a Dolby TrueHD bitstream (only version 1.3 can do this), the upgrade will only allow the deck to transcode Dolby TrueHD into multichannel LPCM.[/quote]

They’re idiots. If the player can decode TrueHD itself, then it can be sent as an uncompressed PCM stream out of the HDMI port which HDMI 1.1 and up can support. I don’t have any idea why they call it “transcoding” — when nothing is being converted or translated. It’s lossless audio guys! When lossless audio is decoded it becomes uncompressed PCM audio. Which, again, any recent version of HDMI can transport. People want it this way… why? I don’t know about you but I don’t see any home theater receiver that can decode TrueHD inside itself. And even if you did, you wouldn’t want it to… you see… any PiP or menu audio has to be mixed on the fly. To do that the player needs to be able to decode the movie’s audio track to raw PCM and mix with the in-player sounds anyway. Thus HDMI 1.2 is just fine, assuming the Blu-ray (or HD DVD) player has the decoder for the audio format used on the optical disc built-in.

They are also quite misinformed, on page 2 they encapsulate VC-1 into the MPEG-4 family.
[quote]
The deck will play MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (AVC or VC-1) and it’s the only Blu-ray deck to offer DVD-Audio playback.[/quote]

VC-1 is in no way related to MPEG-4. Further they make it sound like the player can play MPEG-4 videos, I highly doubt it. It plays the mandatory codecs required for DVD-A, DVD, and Blu-ray. MPEG-4 (part 2) isn’t in the specs. H.264 (MPEG-4 part 10, also known as MPEG4/AVC) however is.
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How are these guys getting these units for review? TR is a PC centric site isn’t it? They don’t test the playback in any objective way nor do they Panasonic are if you’re listening…. send one to Missing Remote — we’ll give it a proper review 😉

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