PS3 as a Blu-Ray Player

Thursday, March 19, 2009

For the last year or so I have been using a Samsung BDP-1200 as my Blu-Ray player and it has generally gotten the job done though it has required the occasional firmware upgrade to be able to play the latest discs. While I'm generally understanding of the need to update the firmware, it annoys my wife and the last straw for her was when she rented Australia and it would not play with no firmware upgrade available. Thus she gave her blessing to get a new BluRay player with the caveat that the new player handle everything and thus my quest for a new player was born. (As an aside for you men out there, the easiest way to get agreement from the wife for a new gadget is to make sure the old one annoys the heck out of her!)

I looked around at the available players and while a lot of options were available most of the good ones were in the PS3 price range. While I hadn't looked at a PS3 previously, considering I already have a Wii and an XBox 360, given that it was about the same price as a regular player and Sony was very active in keeping the firmware up to date I decided to get this instead of a player. It didn't hurt that my eight year old son was strongly in favor of this direction since he had been wanting to try Little Big Planet for quite a while now.

So I headed down to BesyBuy and picked one up along with the Nyko IR Remote for the PS3. I needed the Nyko so that my Harmony remote could control the PS3 during movie playback since the PS3 uses BlueTooth otherwise. So I got home and unpacked the PS3 and proceeded to set it up which turned out to be a breeze since I just reused the HDMI and optical connections from the BDP-1200 it was replacing. One thing to keep in mind with the Nyko remote is that when setting up the Harmony remote the device type is the Nyko and not the PS3 itself. Also note the Nyko cannot power on and off the PS3, no big deal since you have to go to the machine anyways to pop in a disc.

Once it was up and running we popped in a BluRay and were off to the races. Overall the video quality was excellent and generally on par with the BDP-1200 I had previously. The load time for the BluRay was much faster on the PS3 which my wife greatly appreciated, the BDP-1200 was a bit of a slug in this respect. More importantly for my wife, the PS3 handled every BluRay thrown at it which made her very happy. I do have one issue with the PS3 however and that is these periodic white flashes I get only when using the XMB menu and playing regular DVDs, BluRays and games have no issues. I believe this is an HDMI issue and if I turn down the resolution to 720p or 1080i then everything is fine, it only happens at 1080p.

After doing some reading, I suspect the problem is the HDMI cable I am using may only be Category 1. Apparently a Category 1 cable is only rated for up to 1080i but you might get lucky and find it is able to handle 1080p. A Category 2 cable is rated for bandwidth above 1080p and thus should handle 1080p no problem. With this in mind I ordered a couple of 6' HDMI cables (1.3 and Category 2) for $13 from monoprice.com, a much better deal then dropping $60 at the local BestBuy. Once the cables arrive I'll post again about whether or not they fix my issue.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 12:21 PM | Categories: Home Theater | Permalink |

WebLogic Portal and JSF

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Just a quick FYI that there is a great new whitepaper available from the Oracle site on using JSF with WebLogic Portal. This whitepaper provides a comprehensive guide (152 pages!) for building JSF portlets in WebLogic Portal, highly recommended. You can download the whitepaper at the link below, a big thank you to Peter Laird for taking the time to put this together.

Developing JSF Portlets with WebLogic Portal.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 3:56 PM | Categories: WebLogic | Permalink |

WLST and Templates Glitch

The WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) is a great tool for creating pre-configured domains quickly and easily. The tool allows you to define a script in Python that automates the creation of the domain by working with the object model defined in WebLogic. For those unfamiliar with WLST, a great summary can be found here.

Recently I was working with a client to automate the creation of their domains and ran across two issues as follows:

• The username and password for node manager was not taking after it was changed, it was always using the default generated username/password when it was written; and
• A JMS subdeployment could not be targetted to a JMS Server, it always defaulted to the target of the JMS Resource the subdeployment belonged to.

After investigating both issues, it turned out that these operations were getting overwritten by the defaults in the template JAR when the domain was being written. When the code was debugged it was evident that things had been set correctly, however when the domain was written these changes were ignored. The issue was that the directives in the template were overriding what was being done in WLST code. While annoying, an easy workaround exists. All that needed to be changed was to move these operations after the write operation, at this point they could be performed successfully. Here is an example with some pseudo-code:

readTemplate(path)

#Update domain config settings
#...

writeDomain(workingDirectory)
closeTemplate()
readDomain(workingDirectory)

#Perform tasks here that only work if done after domain is written
#...

#Write new changes back out again
updateDomain(workingDirectory)

A small issue with an easy fix, just one thing to keep in mind when working with WLST.

Posted by Gerald Nunn at 3:42 PM | Categories: WebLogic | Permalink |