It's "PS4 vs Xbox One" time again and this time it is about which one of these consoles can be a better media player when it comes to playing Blu-ray discs.
The answer may surprise you but according to Eurogamer, The Xbox One, the console that is marketed as the all-in-one media box/center gets beat by the PS4 when it comes to playing blu-ray.
When it comes to picture quality in this "PS4 vs Xbox One" match-up, According to Eurogamer, the battle is pretty much even.
"In terms of actual picture quality, both consoles output a pure 1080p image without artificially changing the source material in any way, meaning colour accuracy, sharpness and detail are identical. Considering that the Xbox One has to convert Blu-rays from digital component to RGB this is great news, restricting any differences to how individual HDTVs handle these sources."
But this is where it all goes downhill for the Xbox One in this "PS4 vs Xbox One" battle of the media players as reports say that the Xbox One glitches when playing 24 fps blu-rays when playing movies at an extended amount of time (2 hours).
"User reports of compromised 24Hz playback on the Xbox One, however, are disturbing for a console so heavily focused on non-gaming usage. 24fps is a core part of the Blu-ray specification, and any modern device worth its salt should be able to correctly handle that frame-rate without issue. Indeed, the PS3 plays back material at 24Hz flawlessly without introducing any unwanted side effects, and we found the PS4 to be equally solid in this regard. And yet we are on shaky ground with Xbox One. Initially we found the machine outputting a solid 24Hz signal free of any anomalies, but testing a number of discs over a two-hour period revealed some serious audio sync issues where the sound would often lag behind the video by a couple of seconds regardless of what audio setting is selected, making films viewed in this mode unwatchable."
"At this point in time the solution is to switch the Xbox One to 60Hz when playing Blu-ray discs, but doing so introduces noticeable judder as the 24fps source is displayed unevenly through a 60Hz output - not exactly an ideal fix. In fact, we noticed some judder when using 24Hz playback from time to time, indicating that the Xbox One isn't always correctly handling this frame-rate."
But the PS4 isn't completely flawless as the PS4 has a little problem correctly de-interlacing progressive 25 fps content.
"The console struggles to correctly de-interlace progressive 25fps content encoded at 1080i50 without throwing away a small amount of picture information and blending detail from one frame into the next, duplicate image (all of our test consoles output 1080i50 at 1080p50, resulting in each frame being duplicated). Manually switching the console to 1080i shows no improvement, indicating that the machine is internally de-interlacing the signal regardless of the output resolution."
But then the Xbox One sort-of has this problem as well. "The Xbox One gets the de-interlacing part right, but then converts the 50Hz output to 60Hz causing judder - for every five "native" frames, a sixth duplicate is added."
If you want to read more about this battle where Eurogamer not just compares the blu-ray playback but also other aspects of both consoles, click here.