Blu-ray Disc Player Profiles

“Blu-ray Disc is a next-generation, optical disc format that enables the ultimate high-def entertainment experience.”

Part of the plan to provide us with the “ultimate high-def entertainment experience” involves providing a high degree of interactivity for the viewer. Not all Blu-ray players will be able to provide us with the same level of interactivity. In fact players that can provide the “ultimate high-def entertainment experience” will not be available to be purchased until the summer of 2008.

The capabilities of a Blu-ray player to do more than just play movies are categorized by what is known as BD Profiles. The most capable Blu-ray players will offer features that bring it even with the features set of the now defunct HD DVD player. To provide all of the planned interactivity, Blu-ray players must be capable of providing Picture-in-Picture (PIP), to allow the viewer to see things like director’s commentary or alternate camera angles in a pop-up window while the movies plays full screen in the background. To complement PIP, the player must be able to do what is called audio mixing, where a secondary audio source (for example the audio from the director’s comments) can be played over top of the movie audio.

Players must also posses 1 GB of local or removable storage (which will be handy for storing and buffering downloaded content), a virtual file system (VFS) and an Ethernet port (internet connectivity). The virtual file system will allow the Blu-ray player to access different types of files systems in a uniform way. So whether the player is accessing a Blu-ray movie to compile a list of time axis’s of different scenes, or a web server to get a list of URLs for downloadable content, the user experience is always uniform. With Internet connectivity, you add the ability to add in downloaded content as a feed for the PIP content. All of the interactivity that is planned for Blu-ray Disc is built on top of a version of the programming language Java, called BD-java (DB-J). Since Java is a programming language you can use to do additional things like creating games based on the scene of a movie. Play the part of Luke Skywalker as he flies along the surface of the Death Star to launch his torpedo into the exhaust port. With an internet connection, the game could become an on-line multi-player event, with one player as Luke, One as Dart Vader, another as Vader’s wingman and still another as Han Solo on the Millennium Falcon.

So that you won’t be disappointed by the capabilities of your Blu-ray player, here is a list of the current BD Profiles and their requirements.

Only Blu-ray players that were on the market prior to October 31, 2007 may use the Grace Period profile.