American Blu-Ray Player; European TV - Will it blend?

January 12, 2008 6:44 PM

Will a Blu-Ray player purchased in America work with a TV purchased in England?

I have a friend that will be moving to London for a few years and he would like to know if he purchases a US Panasonic BD30 Blu-Ray player and a UK Panasonic TV (model TBD) in London will they play nicely together? The interconnect will likely be HDMI. While this limits the selection of movies that are playable to region 1 movies, that isn't the issue at hand.

I know there are products that can do this, like the Apple TV. It can hook up over HDMI and has 5+ different sync rates to work internationally. Other then region codes, are Blu-Ray players the same?

Does HDMI take care of the sync rate, or do the sources still need to play nice with each other?

Thank you in advance.

posted by jab to technology (4 comments total)

I've no idea about the HDMI interconnectivity (though I'm convinced that'll be fine), but if they bring a US-voltage Blu-Ray player over here, I hope they've got a nice, fancy means of transforming the power supply for it. Otherwise, they'll have a Blu-Weight instead.
posted by armoured-ant at 7:31 PM on January 12, 2008

It should work. HDMI is intended as a global standard.

The high end output of a Blu-Ray player will be 1080p 24f.

A European HDTV set should be able to handle that. If the TV is limited to 720p, the player should be able to send the 720p 24f signal.

The only possible issue will be BD+. BD+ allows the player to display more elaborate graphics and upgradeable DRM. If a new region A disc came out that required a BD+ upgrade and for some reason, they refused to upgrade a European IP address, you'd have a problem.

But they would never block a 'helpful' DRM upgrade, so you should be good to go.
posted by Argyle at 8:06 PM on January 12, 2008

HDMI does nothing but pass the data (well, not quite true because HDCP & HDMI are intertwined, but true enough for this question). The frame rate / sync rate is decided by the contents of the disc; the output resolution of the player by the same thing &/or its internal scaler.

In theory, the player & TV should negotiate it all over HDMI - player says "what can you do?", TV says "I can do one and two and three", player says "OK, the disc and I can do three - let's go!"

(In practice, particularly with different manufacturer's devices at each end, sometimes one device says "Duh? Me no understand...", though this seems to be becoming rarer as implementations mature.)

Shorter version: It's going to come down to what the TV can accept.
posted by Pinback at 8:09 PM on January 12, 2008

They'll play together (assuming HDMI) but bluray is region locked. So his UK discs will not work. He'll have to buy from the US and ship them overseas. I imagine it would be cheaper to buy a UK region player at a certain point.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:41 AM on January 13, 2008