New tv coming, but blu ray players?

[chilistrucker]

I'm sat here scratching my head as usual and the longer I look at stuff online the more confused I become, I think tech really has passed me by so after thoughts from the pros.

The new tv arrives in 2 weeks and its the LG Oled B8, 55 inch. I understand it has the 7 processor and not the 9 but it appears to do everything I want and reviews look positive.

At a later date in the new year some decent audio setup will be added and I was sold on a Kef surround sound system but this may change.

I will probably get the xbox 1 x in December and understand it will play UHD blu rays and after some early problems it seems that xbox have resolved these and all appears well?


So is the xbox 1 x a worthy system to match up to get the optimum from the new tv or would I need a decent stand alone blu ray player?

Opinions welcomed, TIA.

[hornmeister]

As it's a digital medium and players relay the data from the disk to the telly the image and sound quality will be identical to any other Blueray player which supports the same standards.

What you will lose is the usability of a standalone unit from a pure disk playing point of view, may be a bit slower to react and have to navigate menus etc. but the trade-off is that as it's mainly software based it's likely to be able to be upgraded to a certain extent as standards evolve over time so less likely to become obsolete.

I managed to use a PS3 for donkey's years as my only blueray player and experienced no issues.

I'd say run with it and if in a couple of years time it's out of date or doesn't do what you want you can purchase a stand alone player then at a much reduced cost.

[lostmotel]

Decoding of the data on the Blu-ray disc can vary in quality. When I bought a PS4 I noticed the quality when spinning BD films was significantly worse than the PS3. The PS3 is a very well renowned BD player, I was just surprised the PS4 was so clearly worse.

What HiFi have a review of the XBOX https://www.whathifi.com/microsoft/xbox-one-x/revi... Sounds like it's okay, so probably not worth justifying another £250 or so on a dedicated player.

Just following up though on the first reply, data is not simply read from disc and sent to the TV. It is read, the HEVC data decoded and then sent out as a serial datastream over HDMI.

The difference in image quality is mainly to do with the colour compression - BD video is stored using 4:2:0 chroma subsampling which essentially means that the colour content has one quarter the resolution of the luminance content. The colour for an output pixel must be interpolated using the quarter resolution colour data and the full-resolution luminance data. The quality of this interpolation varies.

I ended up getting a Panasonic 4K BD player despite not owning any 4K discs (well, I got Fantastic Beasts in the box) because of their high quality chroma upscaling and upscaling performance with SD content (I have a lot of DVD boxsets). 1080p BD and DVD look far better than even the PS3 did.

[chilistrucker]

Thankyou both very much.
For now I will stick with the x box 1 x when I get it next month and see how it goes. The telly still doesn't get installed until the 28th and I'm really excited as its quiet a big deal for me. THE x box 1 x will follow and then in the new year the audio and a receiver will be added, (unless the DVLA cough up sooner.)

I just want to make sure I can get the most out of the setup when it is all in place.