Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater First 11.1 channel Bluray announced

For those who might care (or can stomach the film), it looks like The Expendibles will be the first 11.1 channel DTS Neo:X equipped film you can try out.

Pardon my ignorance, but what is 'ULTRAVIOLET' that is branded on the casing of this disc? I have not seen that term in context of blu-ray before.

you'll find an answer here:
http://www.blu-ray.com/uv/?action=faq

When I saw the first Expendables I had very low expectations but it turned out I enjoyed it much to my surprise. So I'll give the 2 a shot.

The reason it's enjoyable is because you know it's completely over the top and the actors are just having fun with it.

Ultraviolet is sort of like a bad word for a lot of movie "collectors" since you must be connected up to the internet and are limited to that network connection to determine your playback enjoyment level since it streams across the internet instead of downloading to a mobile/portable device like other digital copies.

As for 11.1, I honestly can't believe that they picked The Expendables 2 for the first release of it. I've seen The Expendables (not #2), and it was cheesy with the action and effects, yet some points were fun for the sheer craziness of it. They are both "niche" movies in my mind. I would have thought that something else would have been a better choice. Even Dolby used a Disney flick (Brave) to show off their Atmos system. While a lot of people don't care much about animation or Disney movies, it is a movie genre that more people would at least "tolerate" to experience the new sound.

So I did some price checking and a receiver capable of 11.1 output and DTS Neo:X decoding will set you back about $2200 - $3000 depending on model and store purchased from.

Plus add the upgrade in wiring and additional speakers up front (even the lower cost M2 in wall or on wall speakers), and you've got a pretty quick $2950 - $3750 upgrade just to hear the over-the-top effects in Expendables 2. Sure, other movies will eventually follow, but look how long it has taken to see movies coming out with good 7.1 mixes. They have just started to become *almost* the standard over the last couple of months.

It will be a long time before I upgrade to something more than my 7.1 setup. Prices will really have to drop on the receivers, but I also fear that I won't go with M2s should that day come. Someone will convince me that M22s are best and that is even more money.

By then, Dolby Atmos will be available for your home, and we will start setting up arrays of speakers in the ceiling too.

So maybe 7 speakers up front, 4 surrounds, and 6 or more overhead. Throw in a couple of subs, and it could be awesome, but expensive with a 17.2 DTS Neo:X / Atmos Home system. Axoim would have to start advertising some sort of "in-ceiling" speaker or something too. Crazy.

I would need to build a new house and have them dig down an extra 2 feet in the theater area to make room for everything.

At some point, the extra channels just don't make sense from a practical installation standpoint, let alone a price/performance point too.

Yep that's about it. Lot's of explosions and stuff. It's in my "eye and ear candy" category.

I just read that the room size for an 11.1 setup should be at least 20 feet by 30 feet (with a recommended height of at least 9 feet)! Wow! 600+ sq ft (5400 cubic feet) MINIMUM and that is for 1 row of seats!

Funny that the DTS Neo:X will also be available for cars too since they say that it needs a massive space to truly be effective, and yet they are going to cram it into a 115 cubic foot car cabin vs. the 5400 cubic feet that they say is needed at home.

When I first saw the word ultraviolet on the disc covers, I was wondering why they were always giving away the Ultraviolet movie with each one of them. I already had the movie.

Thanks for the link JB, that helped alot.

@Nick - The FAQ JB linked to said you did not have to be connected to view downloaded content - plus I assume if you have the physical disc you would not need an internet connection to unlock it. Would that be a bad assumption?

Does anyone have an ULTRAVIOLET disc yet? (other than the movie CatBrat!!!) :-)

I have the B-D of Jaws, which has the UltraViolet feature. I haven't done anything with it yet.

And you call yourself a man.

A lot of my discs have said Ultraviolet, but I don't seem to care about that feature.

So much for me ever having my perfect home theater. I'll leave it to Axiom to make a demo room along these guidelines, and I'll check it out when I visit.

I am going to be happy with 7.2

11.1/2/3/4 is going too far if I need that I will go to the theatre.

I have three. Two TV seasons and a movie.

UV is marketed as a standard, easy way to organize all of your digital copies. Let's see if I can remember the cluster mess, that was me trying to claim my videos.

I have a Vudu account, and Vudu is supposed to work with UV, but it turns out I had to sign up for a separate UV account. I didn't realize until it was too late that I could have used my Walmart.com account for both UV and Vudu, but instead I ended up with three different logins.

Not that it mattered, because I had to go to a specific website for the movie I was trying to claim. And Flixster.com for the TV seasons. But I could just log into either site, I had to go to the URL that was on the piece of paper inside the BD case. For the TV seasons, it was: areallylongurlspellingoutthetvshowseason1

I have my broswer set to not accept 3rd party cookies. I've never had it cause trouble (except for advertisers trying to track me). But the UV claiming process used inline-frame inside of inline-frame linking the various sites together, and they all communicated via cookies. Took me a while to figure out why I was getting "welcome" e-mails, but the site just seemed to hang.

So after a lot of work I now can watch my UV movies on Vudu, and Flixster on my phone right? Wrong. None of the titles I claimed showed up on Vudu, so I can't watch them on my TV. And only the two seasons I claimed on Flixster show up on my phone.

Yet, I do think this is an improvement over the previous process to claim digital copies, which when you get the discs a year after they're released, at a discounted price, the claim codes have expired.

I have a few Ultraviolet digital copies, but have done nothing with them after all of the bad press over at blu-ray.com about it. People there are still buying region free versions of movies from overseas that come with a "true" digital copy, so something is amiss somewhere. I might have to try a few Ultraviolet discs tonight to see for myself.

Did a little digging and I am seeing something that says that it does need to "stream" down to your device, but it sounds more like a download than a true stream, so that is good. Just plan ahead so that you have the bandwidth/time to download it before you need it. Also, there seems to be a limit on most/all of the movies that they can be "streamed" 3 times.

Who knows. Maybe those folks over at Blu-Ray.com are just crazy.

Ooops. JP is out of luck.

I shall continue to rip my purchased BDs with DVDAnywhereHD. I'f I'm entitled to a digital copy anyway, forcing me to go through all of the hoops above is just adding wasted time to my already short life.

You can always get Bose cubes
Seriously... I too think that it would be a very long time until I'll upgrade to anything more than 7.1, which as you pointed out it only started to become the norm very recently.
I personally see it as a money-grab of sorts; I would be a lot happier with the studios taking more time and investing more money into mixing the tracks properly into 7.1, or even 5.1 for that matter. Just last night I watched a DVD from the Superbit collection (Underworld) and it's 5.1 DTS track is phenomenal. It's a shame the Superbit guys didn't get into BR.

The Superbit guys, Sony, invented Blu-ray.

Hence the regret they're not doing Superbit sound quality any more, everyone thinking that if it says DTS, or 7.1 automatically means better sound :-).

Wasn't Superbit just a higher bit rate audio, much like what they have now on BD, not refering to the HD audio but the standard audio track on BD.

Actually, the Sony "Superbit" process was a little bit of the opposite of what you said in that reviewing the specs that came with the discs(I have three of them)by eliminating most if not all of the extra features they were able to use that space by "theoretically" upgrading the amount of space for the video by encoding at almost double the rate thus, improving the picture to its max capabilities for the DVD technology. The audio was left pretty much intact as before, with both DTS & DD 5.1 soundtracks.