[Jungle Jack]

Hello,
What you need to look for are Blu Ray players which offer a "Source Direct" option. Not all players do.
Pioneer's middle and upper line player offer it. I am pretty sure most Sony's do as well. In addition the OPPO BDP-83 has Source Direct.

With Source Direct, the players outputs 480i for DVD and 1080p/24 for Blu Ray to your processor. For upsampling DVD's having Source Direct is huge.
Cheers,
JJ

 

[Jungle Jack]

Other than a multiple format player, why is Oppo all that much better? The video chip is top rated. But matched with a processor that has an equally impressive chip, i just cant see spending the extra $200 to possibly not even use this nice chip inside the Oppo. Couldnt you save the extra bucks on the Oppo and put that money into a decent processor instead? That is if multiple formats are not a big thing to you. Just asking?

Hello,
Where the OPPO's price makes sense is if you are a collector of SACD/DVD-A's and really want an all in one player. In addition, the OPPO offers some of the fastest load times of Blu Ray discs on the market and excellent DVD playback.

All the same, if you do not own SACD's and DVD-A's, and are using an HDMI 1.3 processor to decode and process, there are certainly cheaper players out there that will do an excellent job as well.
Cheers,
JJ

 

[Jungle Jack]

Hello,
The BD60 does not have Source Direct. I would look at the Pioneer BDP-320 or the OPPO BDP-83.
Also, many Sony's offer Source Direct.

However, the majority of BDP's do not offer Source Direct to where your AVR can handle the video processing,
Cheers,
JJ

 

[Jungle Jack]

Hello,
Tony, I realize it does do a bypass, but it does not have a function where for DVD's it automatically outputs 480i and the native resolution of BD. I researched this matter for sometime prior to posting that as I thought it offered it.
Here is a post from Chris Boylan of Big Picture Big Sound

"There is no "source direct" function on the Panasonic players so there is no one setting to let your TV do the de-interlacing and upconverting.

For Blu-rays, you can set the BD60 or BD80 to 1080i resolution and enable 24p output. This will send 1080i/60 discs to your TV at 1080i/60 and will send 1080p discs to your TV at 1080p/24. This will allow your TV to do the HD de-interlacing on those few 1080i/60 blu-ray titles, if you think it does a better job than the player.

For DVDs, you could use the component outputs. If HDMI and component are both active, then component automatically gets 480i output. Then select the component input on your TV for watching DVDs. The only drawback to this is that Panasonic's video processing engine does the de-interlacing on DVDs first, before any other processing, and this is actually not defeatable. When you use the 480i component video output, you are actually getting a de-interlaced/re-interlaced video signal. Panasonic says this process is transparent. I haven't really tested that to see whether it is.

Some Pioneer players have a source direct feature that passes the signal to a display or processor in its native resolution. But the Pioneer players a.) are really slow; b.) offer no streaming capabilities and c.) are more expensive than the Panasonics.

The upconversion and de-interlacing on the Panasonic players is quite good so with 1080p HDMI output and 24 FPS mode enabled on the player for DVDs, I think you'll get great results on your TV. "
Cheers,
JJ

 

[Jungle Jack]

Hello,
With the excellent performance of the Panasonic on DVD's and BD, this really is not an issue. Panasonic does not offer Source Direct on any of their BDP's. Here is a review of the BD80:http://www.bigpicturebigsound.com/Panasonic_DMP-BD80_Blu-ray_Disc_Player.shtml

While I do use Source Direct because I prefer Reon over the Pioneer DVD processing, with the recent firmware updates, I am actually switching back to 1080p output as the general consensus is that it outperforms the Reon.
Cheers,
JJ