Fox to banish slow Blu-ray disc loading on future discs, more tech improvements promised

Hollywood major Fox Home Entertainment says it will soon banish slow loading times on Blu-ray discs. Complaints about tardy disc-loading, caused by DRM and java code, remains a common moan for the format. Now Fox says it has an answer.

At an exclusive tech briefing at Fox Studios LA, Joe McCrossan, Fox's director of software development for BD Live, told Home Cinema Choice that his tech development team has been re-evaluating the fundamentals of BD usability for some time: 'One of the first things we have been working on is how we can reduce the loading times, to do away with spinning wheels and circles altogether. We want to improve the basic user experience.'

Background loading
The trick, McCrossan says, is to load Java in the background, and not upfront. 'When you put a disc in you'll be able to start watching trailers, cards or other material right away. But in the background the player will be doing the setup and getting the disc ready for viewing. This will dramatically reduce the time consumers experience when they are waiting to watch the movie. We've been working on this for a while and I'm expecting it to be available in the near future.'

McCrossan reveals that better disc loading is just one aspect of the studio's ongoing R&D program. Next on his To Do list is countering the lack of a Playback Resume function on BD players. 'We've been looking at how we can let the consumer go back to a disc they have been watching and re-engage from where they left off,' says McCrossan. 'This is one of the things users have become used to with DVD where, if you eject a disc mid-movie the player allows you to resume playback. Unfortunately with BD hardware this is very difficult to do, but on the content side this is something we can tackle. In the near future, when somebody ejects the disc, we'll make sure that all of the stuff you have done with that disc is saved. Whether that's where you are in the movie, if you've been playing a game, creating your own bookmarks, all of that will be saved. So when you put the disc back in you have the option of picking up exactly where you have left off. Our hope is to make that standard once the technology is finalised.'