Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Meridian Blu-ray Player

So, apodizing filters aside, 800D/800DAX (note the lack of v4 in the names of these products) is probably the end of the line for the 800.

I can hardly seem M releasing improved deinterlacing and scaling to get the 800 to state-of-the-art (even though M won't admit that it's not) and charging a major upgrade for it (because that would admit that the 800's video is *not* state-of-the-art).

Juno:

Look inside the 800 and tell me what can stay.

MPEG-2 decoder? Sure, but you also need one that handles H.264 and VC-1. All of the High-Def capable decoders contain MPEG-2 decoders. No need for redundancy here.

Video processing? What works for 480i doesn't necessarily work for 1080. That probably has to be replaced.

Audio codecs? DD and DTS are bare minimum support. Beyond that there's TrueHD, DTS-HD and DTS-HD Master Audio. So the audio processing has to be redone, with more decoding horsepower.

Software? BD-J and new navigators for Blu-ray have to be created.

Encryption? Need to add AACS and BD+.

Many of these are available "off the shelf" for blu-ray. Meridian didn't use off the shelf for a large portion of the 800 spinner.

So what's left from the original chassis? Power supply and HDMI outputs are about it.

At which point, the "cost effective" portion becomes moot. I'm not saying it can't be done but I am saying I don't see the value in it.

The 810 video processor can accept SD and HD resolutions up to 1080p60 according the basic spec sheet you can easily get straight from the Meridian website. The chipset they are using is something I haven't heard of before, but when I checked out their website a couple of weeks ago I must admit I was very impressed. The 810 scaler uses FOUR Qdeo chipsets for deinterlacing and scaling the image in effectively four quadrants which is put back together by a fifth scaling chip inside the projector itself (hence the 4 DVI connection). The specs on the Qdeo seem to cover more than just the basics:

- Advanced per-pixel, motion-adaptive, edge-adaptive 3D de-interlacing for HD and SD video, with support for arbitrary film cadences
- advanced per-pixel, motion-adaptive, spatio-temporal noise reduction for HD and SD video
- Content-adaptive block and mosquito noise reduction for HD and SD video

plus a bunch of other gubbins. Short story long, from the day I spent with the 810 system a couple of weeks back I am VERY impressed. You could feed 1080p from an external video processor into the 810 scaler which would in turn scale to 2400p and apply any enhancements you wanted to use, but I'm not that sure it's going to be necessary. From what I saw from SD and HD sources there was no deinterlacing artefacts getting in the way (admittedly all film material) and the scaling was mostly excellent, certainly no painful edge enhancement or obvious softening of the image whatsover. I did spot some scaling artefacts in very high resolution detail, but the unit had literally that morning been installed with a beta firmware which had brought about a couple of other problems so I give it the benefit of the doubt for the moment. I will certainly want to see this projector again (and the scaler). If any Meridian heads are reading this - get yourself a decent 2.35 system in that theatre ASAP so I can see it in all it's glory!

Website for the processor chip I have been reading from:

http://www.clearlyqdeo.com/
http://www.marvell.com/products/digitalentertainment/qdeo.jsp

They seem to supply quite a few brands such as Pioneer and Sharp, but I guess so do Gennum and HQV the implementations of which vary wildly according to quality of integration. Interesting that Home Theater Secrets gave them an award for best video processing solution last year....

Hi Liam,

Welcome to our Universe...

Joel

Cheers Joel! It's been a long time coming but glad I'm on board. And seems a time when things might just get interesting.... Looking forward to getting myself up to Mostly Harmless!

I think it's time to admit that 800 is a fabulous CD/DVD-A spinner, but that's it. DVD is best done elsewhere - shoot, cannot even get 480i native out of the 800 to be able to use it as a transport for my VP!

It would be interesting to see a G series Bluray player, but for me personally it would need to also do DVD native at 480i and SACD via HDMI (and M 'aint never gonna do the latter).

Meridian lost a G98 sale to me for the same reason. As it happens, for the same price, I got an Oppo 980 and Radiance VP, a far superior solution (IMO) and far more cost effective as the Radiance brings substantial benefits to all of my video sources. And I now have lossless digital DVD-A and SACD with my CLUX HDMI solution.

It's unlikely, isn't it, and a real shame. I do wonder though whether or not SACD will be replaced by audio-only Blu-Ray discs because of the need to have an active display with Blu-Ray menus (DVD-A suffers in this regard in a lot of players). What's the SACD catalog growth these days?

And whilst we know that 1-bit DSD is not a perfect technology and that M had all its eggs in the DVD-A basket, we also know that M would do a fantastic job with DSD-to-PCM conversion. An icing-on-the-cake addition to the M HDMI box... [/dreaming]

You're certainly right John, but if any compromise must be made to save parts or space I could live for sure with a M BDP even if it is profile 1.0 or 1.1 only, aka without "minus" view. ; )
What I care about is first stellar audio and second according to Liam's contribution suggests "top" video processing If I correctly read him accross the lines.

Cheers
j

I agree in general with your sentiments, although it is possible to build a pretty nice SACD collection (and I'm not even talking classical) with some perseverence and $$. Recently added the Dead Can Dance and Genesis back catalogs. Nice!

New Denon Bluray unit announced here in Japan today:

http://denon.jp/company/release/dvda1ud.html

Plays all formats incl DVD-A and SACD. USD 6000.

noticed the 2 HDMI outs , marked up one for video and one for audio . why seperated i thought audio was sort of piggybacked into the video ??

Presumably to allow you to take the audio to a processor and the video to a screen, without the need for a switch box?