The “Break it Down” Blog

Blu-ray Profile 1.1 players have bee available since November 2007, but there were no Profile 1.1 discs. Resident Evil: Extinction has the honor of being the first Blu-Ray Profile 1.1 disc to be released. What do you get when you combine a Profile 1.1 player with a Profile 1.1 disc, and should you care?

Lions, Tigers, and Profiles (oh my!)

The first Blu-Ray players were Profile 1.0 (or “grace period” profile) players. These players have the hardware requirements to play back the content on a Blu-ray disc. Profile 1.0 does not require any local storage, only requires one audio & video decoder (for the main content), and BD-J functionality (for interactive menus, etc).

Profile 1.1 (the “final standard” profile) requires that a Blu-ray player have 256MB of local storage, a virtual file system for said storage, and a secondary audio & video decoder. What do you get for meeting these requirements? The ability to watch “bonus view” or “picture-in-picture” functionality on a Profile 1.1 disc. (Note: you must have both a Profile 1.1 player AND a Profile 1.1 disc for this functionality to be available). Bonus view behaves just like any other picture-in-picture implementation, a small window appears in the corner of the screen that contains interviews with the cast, storyboards, etc. When the PIP window is active the audio track can automatically switch over to the associated commentary track.

Resident Evil: Extinction with Bonus View turned on (a concept image is shown in the top right hand corner of the screen)

If this sounds familiar to you (especially if you own a HD-DVD player) — you’re correct! This is the Blu-ray Disc Associations’ version of “In Movie Experience”, a feature that HD-DVD has supported from day one. The next Blu-ray profile, Profile 2.0 (also referred to as “BD-Live”), will require 1GB of storage and internet connectivity to compete with HD-DVD’s web download features.

If you currently have a Profile 1.0 player, don’t expect a firmware upgrade to add support for Profile 1.1. Most players will require a hardware change (mainly the secondary audio / video decoders) to become 1.1 compliant. The exception to this is Sony’s PlayStation 3, which with firmware 2.10 added Profile 1.1 support. This is due to Sony using the Cell processor on the PS3 to perform Blu-ray decoding.

If you’re looking for a Profile 1.1 player, your options are pretty limited at this time, but all new players (from November 2007) are required to be 1.1 compliant. A few of the newer players are shipping with Profile 1.0 support but contain the hardware to be Profile 1.1 compliant, and will have firmware upgrades released to enable the secondary decoders. If this feature is important to you, check carefully if you are purchasing a new player.

Currently there are no plans to make Profile 2.0 a mandatory requirement, so 1.1 is the final minimum profile specification.

So that’s the background on Profile 1.1, but how does it perform?

…That’s nice, but how does it work?

Directions may vary between different movies, but for Resident Evil: Extinction, to turn on the picture-in-picture functionality there is an option under the special features menu titled “Under the Umbrella, Picture-in-picture experience”.

When the picture-in-picture experience is active and a PIP item appears on the screen, the audio feed changes from the main Dolby Digital track to a Dolby TrueHD audio track (according to the PS3’s UI). This occurs even if the PIP content doesn’t have any audio to go along with it (such as story boards).

Resident Evil: Extinction’s audio tracks — Dolby Digital for the main feature, but it switches to a TrueHD track when PIP content is active.

This can cause an issue if you’re not passing audio over HDMI since the PS3 will downmix the TrueHD track and pass the left and right channels. My suspicion is that the bonus audio track is encoded in stereo anyways, but since I do not have a HDMI capable receiver I have no way to verify this.

In my case, with a Denon 3805 amplifier connected to the PS3 with an optical cable, the amplifier falls back to ProLogic II mode - which not only introduces a momentary loss of audio as it switches processing, but the sound quality is reduced (no dedicated LFE channel, for example). There is also a significant volume difference between the PS3’s stereo downmix of the TrueHD track and the native Dolby Digital track. This can be somewhat fixed by increasing the volume on the PS3’s UI (which affects the TrueHD downmix but not the Dolby Digital volume).

Since this is the first Profile 1.1 disc, I don’t know if this is due to the way the disc is encoded, or an issue with the PS3.

One non-Profile related item that I noticed was when I inserted the disc into the PS3 the XMB displayed a preview image and movie title instead of “BDMV / BD-ROM”. This occurred for Resident Evil 1 and Resident Evil 3, but not for Resident Evil 2. This is probably because Resident Evil 2 has been available on Blu-ray for a while, and they tossed in the existing version into the trilogy pack.

The Resident Evil Blu-ray discs as shown in the PS3’s XMB

Conclusion

Profile 1.1 adds a nice additional feature to Blu-ray, but if you already have a player that can’t be upgraded to Profile 1.1, then I don’t recommend replacing it unless you are a true bonus content junkie. If you have a Sony PS3, or a recent player that can be upgraded to Profile 1.1, go for it! You can always choose to not enable the picture-in-picture functionality if you don’t like it, and the price is right!

Even though it may not be the most exciting upgrade, Profile 1.1 forces the HD-DVD Promotion Group to cross off another feature from their “exclusive to HD-DVD” list. Once Profile 2.0 goes live, the two formats will be even more similar then they are today – making this format war seem even sillier than it is now.