I got a Sony Blu-Ray player recently, a BDP-S370. Enjoyed my two blu-rays on it (stupid things are still nowhere near reality with their pricing…), nice. Back to normality. Pop in a few DVDs, and after a while I found that the stupid machine never seems to resume the discs.

Now, there are lots of discussions about this on the net. Apparently there are issues with something called BD-J, something very weird where Java is somehow on the disc, for whatever unfathomable reason. In some other cases I have read about, people complain about players not resuming blu-ray discs even though these were not BD-J discs. Some people make funny statements like “resume is a feature of the disc". Well, at least I find that funny.

Now, what I want is nothing like this. I don’t even have enough blu-ray discs to find out whether I need them to resume. (Yes, I probably really do need that, but it’s not what I’m on about now.)

What I am talking about is a feature that every one of my DVD players has had, going back ten years or so: the ability to remember the last play position of a DVD. And yes, I mean (of course!) to remember it while I take out the DVD and play a different one. I think most of the players I had had a limit on the number of discs the would remember - ten or twenty or something - but that was never a problem for me in reality.

However, not resuming at all is a big problem. Do you always just watch one disc from beginning to end? Well, I don’t. Never done it, never will. The Sony is going back Monday, and from where I’m standing, blu-ray can die a horrible death, but unless I find a player that has the basic feature set for normal DVDs that I’m accustomed to, I’m not going to buy another one.

So, which player can do what I want? I can’t find any information about this. There are endless discussions about resuming blu-rays, but none about resuming DVDs. Any hints?

Okay, just accumulating some information on this.

I found a hint somewhere that Panasonic players may be a bit cleverer with this than others, so I tried to check it out. In the manual of a Panasonic DMP-BD85, I found this:

Resume play function
Press [1] (PLAY) to restart from this position. The position is cleared if the
    tray is opened or you press several times to display "STOP" on unit's display.
On BD-Video discs including BD-J, the resume play function does not work.

“The position is cleared if the tray is opened"? Really? Why on earth? Okay, sorry, Panasonic. Can’t buy that then.

I checked the manual for a Pioneer BDP-LX91 as well. Found this:

The resume playback function is canceled automatically in the following cases:
? When the disc tray is opened.

Hm, too bad that! Sorry Pioneer, can’t buy that either.

It’s amazing, isn’t it? I just can’t believe this. Of course they never state clearly whether these details apply to all kinds of discs, or whether perhaps DVDs are different somehow… my current DVD player is a Pioneer and it can perfectly remember the last play positions on countless DVDs. Oh dear. I can’t remember being p&@$ed off that badly by a little thing. No blu-ray for me, it seems.

My class Business Apps with DXperience ASP.NET takes place in the Netherlands ten days from now, and today I found that I still have an MSDN Subscription to give away. Sorry, a Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN, that’s what it seems to be called these days. Apparently the subscription will expire at the end of the year, so I can’t keep it any longer.

The training class comes to mind as the just-around-the-corner event perfect to give this away, so I thought I’d do a raffle with the attendees there! Of course, if you haven’t signed up yet, you still can. ;-)

Version 1.2.4.1 of Electric Editing is now available here:

CR_ElectricEditing-1.2.4.1.zip (22610 bytes)

This build is compiled against DXCore 10.1.7, and tested in Visual Studio 2008 as well as 2010. Enjoy!

Oh, and of course if you don’t have a clue what Electric Editing is, check out this overview with the various posts linked from there!

Here’s the newest version of my Visual Studio plugin, built against DXCore version 10.1.7 and tested with VS 2010. The previous build had a problem getting the colors right in VS 2010 – that is fixed now.

Check out the original description here!

The instructions for use haven’t really changed much. Here they are again:

• If you don’t have DXCore yet, download it here and install it: http://www.devexpress.com/dxcore (oh yeah - it’s free!)

• Download the plugin here: OS_CompilationResult-1.0.1.0.dll

• Drop the plugin dll into this folder (adjust if your installation path is different, and of course insert your own username): C:\users\<me>\Documents\DevExpress\IDE Tools\Community\PlugIns\

• Restart Visual Studio

• If you want to configure the lists of things the plugin says (or you even want to switch it off - what made me say that?), go to the Options dialog (DevExpress menu, Options) and find the page Hinting/Compilation Result

I just decided to give the go-ahead for my DevExpress DXperience ASP.NET training class, which takes place November 29-30 2010 in Egmond an Zee in the Netherlands. The group is only just large enough this time though, so here’s a shout-out for people interested in the topic! I still have seats available - sign up and tell your friends :-)