Blu-ray Disc Interactivity with Authoring Expert, Joe Rice
Dolby Podcast Episode 51 - November 6, 2008
Joe Rice from MX Entertainment joins us to discuss some of the interactive features of Blu-ray Disc. In this episode, Joe covers:
- Blu-ray Disc authoring and the many considerations required during the authoring process,
- interactive menus in Blu-ray,
- Bonus View, otherwise known as Profile 1.1, and
- BD-Live.
[music]
Craig Eggers: Streaming to you from our headquarters in San Francisco this is Dolbycast, the insider's guide to entertainment technologies from the experts at Dolby laboratories. We're here to give you the straight talk and news on everything you need to know about technologies that excite your eyes and ears.
Craig: And welcome back to Dolbycast, we're glad to have you with us. You know the shiny disc has really become an everyday part of our entertainment experience but you know when you think about it, it's more than just a shiny disc. There's a lot of magic on that disc and when you think about it a lot of work goes into creating that. Not just creating a movie but also finding ways to take that movie, put it on a shiny disc and bring all those value added features that we've come to expect from DVD and Blu-ray into our home theaters.
Well here to discuss interactivity on those shiny little discs and how those shiny little discs are actually made is a very special guest. Mr. Joe Rice is the technical director of MX Entertainment.
Joe, welcome to Dolbycast.
Joe Rice: Well thank you Craig and thank you and Dolby for having me on.
Craig: We're glad to have you here. You know obviously the connection with Dolby is you have produced some of our demo discs for Dolby haven't you?
Joe: That's right, yes.
Craig: That's basically how I got to know you but the fact is MX is really involved with the entertainment industry and the entertainment community. Tell us what MX does.
Joe: Sure, MX is a fairly small multi media company here in San Francisco. We've got 10 to 15 people and we've been specializing in Blu-ray, both creative design production and disc authoring for the last three years or so. Primarily Blu-ray focus.
Craig: How many people work for MX?
Joe: You know at this point we're up to about 15, 16 people including all the designers and QC people, etc.
Craig: That's a great question. What type of people work for MX? What do you do? Tell us about the type of people that work for MX.
Joe: Sure, well I'm the technical director so I oversee both discs authoring, Java programming which is part of Blu-ray discs nowadays, QC. We also have a creative side and so my partner in the company, Ola is the creative director. We'll have a number of production graphics people, motion graphics people, animators working on actually creating the assets that go on the disc.
One sort of unique thing about MX is that the creative and technical are really sort of meshed together somewhat in that I'm always consulting with those guys and they're consulting with me. We know that what they come up with can be put on a disc and we decide that at the point of inception of the design.
Beyond that there's a lot of QC folks. You find when putting thousands of assets on a disc, you know making sure that they're all right.
Craig: Sure.
Joe: Becomes the most important part of the process.
Craig: It sounds like you're an end to end provider.
Joe: That's true, yes.
Craig: Somebody would hand you the assets and say, "This is what we want and this is what we want to create and this is what we want to include." At some point in time you deliver that.
Joe: Yes, yes we do everything from full creative. Coming up with everything from package art, to the menus, to doing compositing, designing special features, kind of creating bonus features from scratch based on a movie or a concert or something like that.
All the way through offering Java programming and we can even handle replication for folks.
Craig: Tell our listeners, you mentioned Java programming, tell our listeners the importance of Java programming.
Joe: Sure, one of the differentiating factors on Blu-ray versus DVD is, is the incredible level of interactivity you can have. There's a couple of different flavors of that on Blu-ray. The most advanced of that uses Java to create applications whether those be games or fancy menus, animations that you can't do in kind of the standard what's called HDMD mode of Blu-ray.
It brings a whole universe of possibilities to this shiny disc format that just wasn't there with DVD.
Craig: Yes, I want to discuss interactivity moving forward but you work with obviously Dolby, you've done our demo discs. Great demo discs, the last effort was incredible, thank you very much but you also work with home video companies.
Joe: That's right.
Craig: Any great titles you want to mention.
Joe: Sure.
Craig: Where would we see your work?
Joe: [laughs] Out on the shelves, we've done a couple of titles for Fox: Ice Age 2 - The Meltdown, The Sentinel. Those were some of the first discs, actually some of the first Blu-ray discs that came out and some of the first discs that we did. The folks in the company love music. We come from a background of doing a lot of music DVDs. So, that's really close to our heart and soul.
Craig: Yeah, how do I get the "Quadrophenia" disc from you?
Joe: [laughs] We can talk after the show. Get that for you. As you mention, we did The Who on DVD. On Blu-ray we've done some titles for Nine Inch Nails. "The Police: Certifiable" is coming out soon and that will have Dolby TrueHD, 24/96 soundtracks. We've got a Jimi Hendrix project coming out soon.
Craig: Really?
Joe: There's Incubus, that we did for Sony BMG. There's quite a few music titles that really are... Seeing a concert in Hi-Def on Blu-ray is such a vastly different experience than seeing it on DVD. It really makes sense.
Craig: I agree. Besides authoring discs - and you touched on this point. Once you create the disc, once you author it, you've got to make sure it's compatible on playback devices.
Joe: That's right.
Craig: I understand that you also work with hardware manufacturers?
Joe: That's right. When you talk about Java, for instance, being in all these Blu-ray players, a manufacturer may choose to implement that Java however they'd like to, using the Java core virtual machine from a different company. What happens is that discs play back differently on different players. The Blu-ray spec is still evolving, even a couple of years after the format was released. It's very...
Craig: Sounds like DVD.
Joe: Yeah. [laughs] The lesson that was learned from DVD for a lot of these companies is that they understand now the need to work with content providers and content authors like us to determine exactly where compatibility issues arise and making sure that things work the way that they're supposed to by the time the discs get out on the market...
Craig: Yeah.
Joe:... and the players get out on the market.
Craig: I can tell you: the last thing you want is for a hardware manufacturer to get that phone call on a Friday saying: "Hey, we're introducing this disc on Tuesday, but guess what? It doesn't play on your player."
Joe: That's right. [laughs]
Craig: Not a good thing.
Joe: That's right. So, we work with all the major manufacturers and are providing prototype discs to them. They've been incredibly helpful in improving our workflow and improving our code. Hopefully we've been helpful to them in improving their hardware.
Craig: I think another thing that the hardware manufacturers learned from that experience is: a lot of the new players now are flash upgradeable. A lot of manufacturers will post on their websites version 1.0, version 1.5, etc. Which literally respond to some of the creative elements that you might be developing that are pushing the boundaries, if you will.
Joe: That's right. Yeah. That's one thing I'd say. If you're listening to this and you have a Blu-ray player or you're going to get one this holiday season, first thing you do: go and look for a firmware update and...
Craig: Go to their website?
[laughter]
Joe:...make sure that your player is up to date, because chances are you'll have a much better experience if it is. With the Java, especially, there are so many different ways to do things on Blu-ray that we're not going to think of all of them and the player manufacturer is probably not going to think of all of them.
It's when we put the two together and see how things are actually being implemented that it's like: "Oh yeah, you can do it like this and that's how it'll appear."
Craig: The whole disc authoring thing must be a very extensive business and a very extensive proposition. Somebody is delivering to you the assets, delivering to you their guidance as to what they want the disc to do, what they want it to be.
Can you walk us through that process of: OK, I'm a home video company, I've delivered to you the assets and at some point in time I expect something out of you? What happens in-between?
Joe: [laughs] Magic.
Craig: [laughs] There you go.
Joe: We got a big computer...
Craig: Magic shiny disc, right?
Joe: Yeah. There's the big red button. What will happen is we'll start out with a conceptualization. Sometimes people will have an idea of what kind of games or menus or designs they'll want on it. What kind of fancy - what they call "Next Generation for Blu-ray" - features they'll want.
Sometimes they'll just say: "You know what? The sky's the limit. Why don't you guys come up with something?" Which we're happy to do and we love that kind of freedom. Once we get past the design point and those assets start coming in, as you mentioned, the first thing we do is make sure that everything's documented. We have delivery specs that need to be in formats we can use to, for instance, encode the true HD, depending on the software we're using.
The video files are in the right format for Blu-ray, things like that. So, we'll do an extensive asset QC process before it even gets anywhere near disc authoring. We'll go through all the files and make sure the formats are OK, linear QC, watch them end-to-end and make sure there are no glitches or pops or things like that.
Craig: How do you ensure that the audio and video are always in sync because I know the most annoying thing in watching broadcast and having some lag between the video and what's being spoken or what's being heard?
Joe: We'll lay everything out in a non-linear editor final cut. We'll pull the audio and video in and we'll watch it end-to-end and make sure that it stays in sync.
Craig: I'm sure you're really conscientious about that.
Joe: Absolutely. That's the first phase of the QC. Then everything gets encoded and converted to the specific formats that they need to be on Blu-ray: for instance, Dolby TrueHD or Dolby Digital or some of those audio formats, and AVC or VC1 or Impact2 for the video formats.
They just get crunched down, put into authoring where they get muxed into the files that actually go on the disc.
Craig: What does "mux" mean for our listeners?
Joe: That's multi-plexing. You'll come in with a separate audio stream, video stream and maybe a subtitle stream and those all get combined into one file essentially. It's just merging them into one file.
Also, at this point if we're doing a Java disc for instance, our Java programmers, which we have a couple, will be working on the menus or the games or whatnot simultaneous to all this asset prep and QC going on. We'll do some documentation so they know what hooks they need to get into to access some of the video and things like that.
If it's an HDMV, the person actually doing the disc authoring amongst them would be doing that aspect of it. Then we start building discs and prototypes. Then we start doing more rounds of QC. Then we're checking the sync, the audio and video after it's all on the disc.
We'll check it in maybe a dozen different players because all may behave a little bit differently and you need to account for it. There are a number of optional things in the spec. You need to make sure to account for how each player interprets that.
Craig: If I light a fire underneath you, how long does it take?
[laughter]
Craig: If I'm a content provider and I need to have this disc out next month, can you do that? How much time would you really like to have to work with these productions?
Joe: I'd say for an average disc that we do, we'd love to have four to six weeks. For a simple disc that's a feature and a couple bonus programs and isn't much more than what a DVD would be from an interactive standpoint, we can crunch and do it in a couple weeks if we have to.
For something where you really want to leverage what Blu-ray gives you as far as interactive options and pop-ups and things like that, to make sure it's perfect and QCed and plays in all the players, especially if it's Java, it's generally a four-week job.
Craig: So, that final product that you deliver to the replication facility, the place where they press and stamp the disc and do all that stuff, what is that?
Joe: That's just some files on a hard drive at this point. Back in DVD days it was all delivered on DLT tape, which has gone the way of the dodo.
[laughter]
Joe: These files are pretty big. They're up to 50 gigabytes for a dual layer disc. We'll usually ship a little pocket hard drive.
Craig: Obviously you make backups just in case.
Joe: Oh, yeah. We've always got backups.
Craig: You don't want all that work to go to waste.
Joe: They can also be delivered over the network, too. You can get a really fat network connection. All the replicators will take things over the network. That's another part of the process: backup all the assets, the source assets, the encodes, and the projects.
You never know, two years down the road somebody might come back and say, "We want to make a little tweak and do this again." You don't want to have to do that from scratch.
Craig: Interesting stuff. Mr. Joe Rice from MX Entertainment. Joe, when we come back I want to talk about interactivity.
Joe: Sounds great.
[music]
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Craig: We're back at Dolbycast with our very special guest, Mr. Joe Rice of MX Entertainment. Joe, for those of us who are stuck in the olden days, or were stuck in the olden days, obviously we have laser disc and VHS, basically linear formats that didn't have a lot of interactivity.
Joe: Right.
Craig: Then came this shiny little disc called DVD that introduced us to a menuing system on a disc, multiple languages, multiple angles, and multiple subtitles. One of the things that MX has really specialized in, I think, is this whole multi-angle aspect of DVD. Talk about that.
Joe: Sure. MX started way back in 2001 looking for a new interactive music format for music video and hadn't even settled on DVD originally. But, after about six months R&D decided that DVD was really the format to look at.
Multi-angle is one of the features of DVD that lets you have all these parallel video streams running that you can just switch between. As the name implies, it can be a different camera view of something. For a concert, it makes sense. You can look at the lead singer instead of the wide shot of the stage, something like that.
Craig: Or the lead guitar player.
Joe: Or the lead guitar player, right. [laughs] Or the drummer if you...
[laughter]
Craig: I've got to defend my passion.
Joe: We started using that and looking at the different ways we could use that on specifically look at music discs, and I think we came up with some pretty cool ideas.
Craig: Tell us, you have a disc out or you've worked on a disc, called Tommy and Quadrophenia Live with Special Guests. Tell us about that.
Joe: That was a two-volume disc that The Who put out a few years back that covered one of their tours where they reenacted Tommy and Quadrophenia live onstage. I think the two happened in the eighties or early nineties.
What we did there with the multi-angle, specifically is we went out and shot interviews with Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend while they were watching this stuff played back that they may not have looked at for years and years and got their reaction to what's going on, on the screen.
Through the use of multi-angle we were able to provide this running commentary that you could switch on or off whenever you want while you were watching the concert. Hit your enter button, up pops Roger and Pete and they're talking about what you're looking at right there.
You're hearing them and you're seeing the stuff behind them. You want to go back to the show? Just hit enter and it'll pop right off again.
Craig: Was that part of the original proposal of the concept of the disc or did you actually add this to the disc?
Joe: That was something that we added. We were known for doing multi-angle things, and they wanted us to come up with a cool special feature for it.
Craig: Very cool. One of the things that I'm always talking about is the fact that interactivity on DVD was really made possible by, quite frankly, Dolby Digital, because if you were to bring a multi-channel audio track and put it on a DVD disc and make a PCM or whatever, the amount of data required to deliver 5.1 in just one language much less eight different audio streams potentially, just would not enable a high-quality picture.
Joe: Oh, hardly any picture.
Craig: Hardly any picture and certainly no special features and none of the extras that are part of the DVD disc. It's interesting. We work for a company that not only delivers great audio presentations and great audio performances but also helps ensure the quality of other things that are on our entertainment content.
Joe: Absolutely. For The Who disc we wouldn't have had space for that feature. Furthermore, since we had to have multiple audio streams, we had to have the version of the concert just itself, also the version of the concert with the commentary mixed in over it, that would not have been possible without Dolby. I'll talk about some ways we do that even differently and better in Blu-ray.
Craig: Cool. So, let's talk about Blu-ray, since you brought the subject up. You know, when we graduated out of DVD in to Blu-ray, the menu structure changed, didn't it? Obviously in DVD we could go to main menu. We could see moving video in those little thumbnails. We could also hear some associated audio. But, you could never watch the movie and pop up a menu, could you?
Joe: That's right, you have this kind of, you have the separation between the program and the menus and you are always bouncing back and forth, between one or the other.
Craig: Well, the cool thing with Blu-ray obviously is, it solves that whole problem.
Joe: That's right, with Blu-ray you can have menus over the video. We call it a pop up menu. There is a pop up button on every remote control. You could do a disc without any separate menus whatsoever. It can all just be one experience that involves both the program content and the menus.
Craig: I still haven't mastered my remote control. I get the pop up to pop up, but then when I am trying to get it to pop off, I invariably shut the whole movie down then I got to start all over from the very beginning.
But is there any special type of work, any processes involved that, I mean, what was it that enabled these pop up menus to occur during playback in the movie. That wasn't possible with DVD maybe.
Joe: Well the main thing was that the studios wanted it. [laughs]
Craig: That's a good driver.
Joe: Right, they asked and the player manufacturer said, OK we will figure it out. But, the main thing that Blu-ray adds over DVD in that arena is the ability to have this graphics plane that's over the video. So, you have your video payback but you also have this whole another layer on top of it. That's full resolution, full screen, and full color graphics.
Craig: So it's treated as whole different layer and because of that, it can be overlaid over your video.
Joe: That's right, in DVD all you had for that was the subtitle layer which, you could use for buttons if you wanted to. There is no pop up, concept of a pop up but you also only had three colors available really. So, that would be really blocky and kind of look like Pong.
Craig: [laughs] Now, all these first generation players could play these pop up menus.
Joe: That's right, it's part of the Blu-ray spec and every player has to support it.
Craig: But, now we have players in the marketplace, that basically, I guess, since the first of the year, support something called Bonus View. Talk about Bonus View.
Joe: Sure, Bonus View is another term for what some folks may have heard as Profile 1.1. When Bu-ray first came out, there were lot of really compelling features that were still being kind of worked out in the spec. They decided to do this sort of gradual, staggered introduction and as you mentioned that was optional on the initial players. The PS3 support it and I am not sure which other ones did.
Craig: I think that was pretty much it.
Joe: Yeah. So, since about the first of the year, every player and every player that comes out, in the future we have to support it. And Bonus View is the name, kind of implies is, the way to have the second video stream, that plays back with the primary video. We call it secondary video. Also, we call it picture in picture or PIP.
What that means is, I talked about that you have an additional graphics layer in Blu-ray, but you also have this additional video layer that you can pop on top of the primary video.
So, for instance going back to The Who thing that we did on DVD. This could be a great way to do that. We could have a separate PIP stream for a Roger, and a separate one for Pete, then one for both of them. You could choose between and just turn the video on and off without having to....
Craig: Is there only one PIP stream. I mean, I couldn't have multiple PIP boxes with Bonus View, could I?
Joe: You can't have multiple displays at one time but you can have 32 Picture in Picture screens that you can choose between.
Craig: Got you. And then you choose the stream that you want. OK that's overlay.
Very cool, so there is an audio portion of that, too. Not only do you have a Picture and Picture box but you also got secondary audio.
Joe: Secondary audio, which you can use either in conjunction with the PIP or on its own. The cool thing about secondary audio is that, it enables you to do a commentary or anything else and actually mix it over the primary audio that's on the disc.
So, you don't have to do. As I mentioned with The Who, we had to do a full audio stream. For surround we had to do another surround mix that included it the commentary. And another full audio stream in the disc. With Bonus View, with secondary audio, we can use a low bit rate. For example the Dolby Digital Plus stream to just have the commentary and the player will actually mix that into whatever your full resolution full range high bit rate lossless audio is for what's going on underneath.
Craig: One of the points we've been making on Dolbycast is when you buy a Blu-ray player you want to be sure to buy a player that does decoding inside the player primarily and specifically for this function. If you've got a Dolby TrueHD sound track that's your main sound track on the disc and your secondary audio sound track which could be up to five one correct?
Joe: Right.
Craig: That could be a Dolby Digital Plus sound track. Those two are muxed together - muxed.
[laughter]
Craig: Those two are mixed together inside the player.
Joe: That's right.
Craig: You really always want to default to the highest quality audio signal that might be on that disc for the main audio track. So, having Dolby TrueHD decoding in that player, being able to enabled that to decode and mix with your secondary audio is important.
Joe: That's right. That mixing happens in the player.
Craig: It doesn't happen in the AVR.
Joe: Correct. There is no way to actually output two separate streams and have the AVR do the mixing so your relying on how what the player can decode so it can do that mixing in the uncompressed domain and then feed it to the AVR.
Craig: Cool, so tell us about the workload to create Bonus View.
Joe: To create Bonus View, it doesn't add a whole lot but it's got its own little idiosyncrasies that you have to be aware of. For instance most commonly your feature whether it be a concert or a film is going to be at film speed or 24 frames per second. And so if you have Bonus View along with that picture in picture it actually also has to be 24 frames per second even though most SD video happens to be shot at 30 frames per second.
Craig: Video not originally film sourced.
Joe: Exactly. So, you end up having to do frame rate conversions and things like that to make sure it matches up.
There is also an interesting feature you can use with Bonus View which is called luma keying which means you can make part of the secondary video transparent, create holes through it, to see the primary video.
Craig: Like almost an opaqueness then, if you will.
Joe: Yeah, exactly. It's a little bit limited in that it's either fully transparent or it's fully opaque.
Craig: Now, is that something I can do for my player or is that something you would actually author in.
Joe: That is something we would actually author in.
Craig: So when you author it would there be a solid version and an opaque version or just one version.
Joe: Well, actually it's interesting. What you would see when you author it, the source you create would have these big black blotches or these big rectangle around the outside. One reason we'll use is that we might want the PIP to be a little bit smaller, have rounded edges or something, or have a treatment, but be smaller than what a full SD frame would look like over HD. So, we'll actually kind of shrink the video and put this big black border around it that when the player sees it, it gets rid of that border and shows through to the video that's underneath it.
Craig: Cool. So, is Bonus View about picture in picture and secondary audio only or is there something else that can be done with Bonus View that maybe hasn't been done yet.
Joe: That is mainly what it is about but it also introduces this concept of doing updated content. So, that means that you could copy content from the disc to your player. It incorporates support in the players for hard drives or USB drives for actual storage for media.
Craig: Oh really?
Joe: Exactly yeah.
One thing you could do with Bonus View for instance is you could get updated trailers. Let's say you bought a Fox movie and then six months later another Fox movie comes out you have on Blu-ray and it's got the latest trailers. It can actually load those onto your player's hard drive or USB or memory card or what not and then when you put your older Fox titles in, they would recognize that the trailers have been updated and actually show you trailers for current releases instead of the stuff that came out when you bought your disc.
Craig: That's interesting. But, that would all be disc based then. We are not talking about any...
Joe: That's all. Right.
Craig:...streaming or downloading here.
Joe: No network for Bonus View. Yeah.
Craig: So for our listeners who might have bought a first generation Blu-ray player, that's not Bonus View compatible, any problems, any issues there?
Joe: Nope, it just ignores the fact that there is picture in picture there or secondary audio. It doesn't even know about it. It raises a few things we have to think about when designing the content and when designing the menu. We'll have to have a different version of the menu. For instance, we just did this Jimi Hendrix disc which used picture in picture not for a commentary. It was kind of wild actually. One of the very first portable video cameras ended up being used at Woodstock back when Jimi was on.
It's black and white. The picture quality looks like something you'd get from a kids toy nowadays, but it's an incredible document.
To contrast it with a 16-millimeter film that was being shot, we synced it up to the main film presentation and have it available as a picture-in-picture so you can see what the amateur cameraman who just happened to have this cool gear was shooting.
Craig: Sweet.
Joe: On a Profile 1.0 player, that's not available. If you try to choose the picture-in-picture and you just have the little box that says, "Sorry you need to have a Bonus View player for this."
Craig: You bring me to a good point, which is how do I know there's Bonus View content on my disc?
Joe: That's a good question. Some players will have an icon, like they had an angle icon for multi-angle. Some players may have a little Bonus View icon indicating when it's apparent. It's something that we try to think of in the design process and make sure that folks know when it's there and when it isn't.
Craig: Is there a label on the boxes when I get a box? Is it easy to identify that?
Joe: There's a Bonus View logo. It's the stylized word, "Bonus View." It's available on the box, but you never know. Is that on all the content that's on the disc or just the main program? So we try to have something in the menus that indicates it.
On the Jimi disc for instance, there are some holes in the content where the video guy wasn't shooting or whatnot, so we just put some words in that stream saying the feature's on the Bonus View's going to show up in a few seconds.
Craig: Sweet. It sounds like Bonus View took us one step up in terms of interactivity. Obviously beyond that is BD-Live. When we come back, we're going to talk about BD-Live.
Announcer: Hey, listeners! Got a question for Dolbycast? Contact us at Dolbycast at Dolby.com or our new toll free number: 888-6-DOLBYC.
[music]
Craig: We're back at Dolbycast talking with Mr. Joe Rice of MX Entertainment about interactivity in Blu-ray disc. The next question, Joe, what is BD-Live?
Joe: I never thought you'd ask.
Craig: [laughs]
Joe: BD-Live is essentially adding a network connection to your player. It's taking your Blu-ray player and connecting it to the Internet.
Craig: OK. What happens then? I've got an Internet port. I've got to connect my cable. What happens?
Joe: That all depends on what the disc will let you do. [laughs] So it's a world of possibilities. There's everything from being able to download new trailers, new subtitles, and new audio mixes.
Let's say you guys do a Dolby demo. You've got a 5.1 mix when the disc was first made but then you go out and do a 7.1 mix or 192 24. We can download that and add that to the disc and as an additional audio stream down the line.
Craig: Let's talk about the hardware side. Let's back up just a sec. BD-Live requires obviously a player that has some sort of Internet connection.
It also requires some sort of memory storage capability either built in to the player or it's my understanding some players are actually going to have some external flash memory devices that plug into them, that store whatever content we're going to deliver in stream into that player, correct?
Joe: That's right.
Craig: The other thing we've got to make really clear to our listeners is that BD-Live is an optional feature.
Joe: That's right.
Craig: It's an optional feature in terms of the players. It's not mandatory for it to be in the player.
Joe: It's unlike Bonus View, which is mandatory for all the players.
Craig: The idea with BD-Live is I'm streaming some sort of content down to my player after I purchase a disc, right?
Joe: That's right. Actually the disc becomes a key to content that can be refreshed and delivered for years and years to come instead of just being fixed on that little shiny disc.
Craig: How do I know this disc is equipped with this key and has the BD-Live functionality or the capability?
Joe: There's a BD-Live logo that you can look for on the package. It will be the same BD-Live logo that you'll see on your player or on your player's box or manual.
Craig: I purchase a disc that's equipped with BD-Live functionality. What happens next?
Joe: When you put it in your player, it depends on however the disc is designed to behave.
For instance, Iron Man came out last week, and it's got BD-Live on it. You put the disc in, and there'll be a little notice saying, "There's some BD-Live stuff available. Do you want to take a couple minutes and download it right now or do you just want to jump right to the feature?"
That's one experience you may see. You may see an option on the main menu to go to the BD-Live section and download some trailers. There may be an option to look for new content. On the Neil Young disc we're doing, there's a whole separate application that's called the Timeline. I should give a little background.
On the Neil Young disc we're doing, there's a 10 Blu-ray set called "The Neil Young Archives." It covers about a 10-year period in Neil's musical history. There's this application on all the discs called the Timeline that's essentially one page per year of these 10 years. You've got these little thumb pins that show up when there's content available.
He's actually found whole albums of material that didn't make it on the discs themselves. He might decide, "I want to put some of these tracks up for people to download." You go into the Timeline application. You're going back and forth. Look. A pin just showed up, look there's some new content available. Get some info on it. Choose to download it, and as you mentioned you can download the new audio to your player. Then you can play it back and you have stuff that didn't show up on any of the disc archives in the set.
Craig: Fantastic. Lots of cool content. The thing I see with BD-Live is in the past when I purchase a disc that handshake occurred. I handed over my money. I got something. But, the cool thing with BD-Live I think is that handshake is enduring.
Joe: That's right.
Craig: I purchase a disc and my relationship to the studio potentially never ends because they can continuously download to me new content, exciting trailers, and new musical selections possibly?
Joe: That's right and from our standpoint it means that we never stop working on a disc.
Joe: We never get to have the wrap party. [laughs]
Craig: Job security. Going to love that!
[laughter]
Craig: We mentioned music. We mentioned potential for games to be downloaded. Talk about games for just a second.
Joe: Sure. One interesting aspect of this interactivity is the ability now to play games with other people or a friend across country. You could put the same Blu-ray disc in, and you guys can actually play head-to-head: for instance, a head-to-head trivia game or even an action game.
Craig: Is that right?
Joe: We showed this Alien vs. Predator BD-Live game at CES that we worked on with Fox. You could actually do a head-to-head shooting game interacting with your friend who is across the country. The players will get synchronized. It's a great way to make more of a social experience out of watching the film.
Craig: Interesting. During our break you were talking about Flickr. Tell me about that.
Joe: Sure. BD-Live is probably most commonly going to be new content, new subtitles and audio as you mentioned, but it doesn't have to be. One of the cool applications that we're looking at is to be able to support Flickr or Picasa and have that on your disc.
If you're house is anything like mine, the biggest screen in your house is in your living room. It's not on your computer. So, being able to check out all your photos or your friends' photos, whether it be YouTube or still images or whatnot, on your Blu-ray player I think makes a lot of sense.
Craig: It sounds like there's a lot of flexibility built into what BD-Live can be in the future?
Joe: That's right.
Craig: This was Joe Rice of MX Entertainment telling us all about the interactive features of Blu-ray disc. If you have questions, don't hesitate to contact us at 1-888-6DOLBYC. If you're less inclined to leave a message, you can write to us at Dolbycast at dolby.com.
Another engaging interesting edition of Dolbycast. Stay tuned. We'll see you next time.
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