For Adam's cites and apparently the prevailing opinion to be accurate, you must dismiss any cites from 2013
"Cite", singular, not "cites" from 2013. (...although I would say "citation"; never seen anyone but you use "cite" as a noun, although apparently that is a thing.) The one and only quote you keep coming back to is from Yusuf Mehdi, nearly three years prior to the format's launch, who also said
"Kinect will always be integral to Xbox One" after it stopped being sold with all consoles and
who just the other day had to backpedal from an erroneous statement. Heckuva track record you've got there.
For what you're saying about Ultra HD Blu-ray playback in these consoles to be correct, many more quotes from many more people responding to this far more recently would all have to be incorrect. No one from Microsoft or Sony over the past 2 years has said anything along the lines of what you're claiming. In fact, literally every statement from anyone at Microsoft and Sony since these consoles actually launched has indicated or flat-out said the exact opposite, even to the point of detailing the precise reasons why playback is impossible. You reject those assertions from Microsoft and Sony, insisting that they're all lying/ignorant and that a firmware update is mere months (perhaps even weeks) away.
the EU Government Voluntary power compliance letters
They never once mention Ultra HD Blu-ray. None of what you're associating with these documents is supported elsewhere.
Slides from Microsoft and AMD
...that never once mention Ultra HD Blu-ray. You're taking a few words from an AMD slide (not even a complete sentence!) that are not substantiated elsewhere and weaving a grand story around it.
The whitepaper you most frequently reference is one you admit to not really understanding, and you also admit (as of late, anyway) that you only just
think that a Blu-ray drive can be firmware-updated to read Ultra HD Blu-ray media. There is no evidence supporting this claim, while a significant number of people from Microsoft and Sony are saying that new hardware is necessary.
Patents and PDFs from Sony, Microsoft and others
Oh, boy. Please enlighten me.
as well as descriptions of how AMD supports HEVC and that they have HEVC hardware accelerator blocks and support HEVC encode and decode in their VCE 3 and UVD 6 which are in GCN 1.2 2014 dGPUs and in Carrizo
There's no argument that AMD products from the past year or so have dedicated HEVC decoders. The point of contention is that these were secretly in the Xbox One and PS4 years prior. You are basing this 100% on a few words from an AMD presentation (which never references the PS4, incidentally) and isn't about decoding high bitrate UHD video in the first place. There's no evidence whatsoever to support this.
Or that AMD, Sony and Microsoft are using Xtensa DSP blocks for codecs which can also support Vision processing, VR, OpenVX, HD and UHD blu-ray audio, low power key phrase turn on which explains the custom USB3 port for the cameras and Mics and more.
Provide evidence that Xtensa DSP blocks can handle the demands of decoding 10-bit, 100 Mbps UHD HEVC video. The only person I've ever come across making claims like this is you.
If there's a dedicated HEVC decoder in-hardware as you claim, why would Xtensa DSP blocks come into play for decoding this video anyway?
AMD says they use the same technology the XB1 uses for HEVC
They never said that.
UHD capable is more than just the ability to display 4K.
...which is not what the documents you're so fond of referencing actually say.
To accept Adam's cites you must close your mind to information on DRM from reading about ARM Trustzone and secure video pipelines, information available on blu-ray drives gleaned from reading technical papers that state BD-ROM drives can be firmware updated to BD-R and BD-R drives from 2010 can read three layers. You must accept that a Saleman's quote must be taken literally to mean that no older Game Console can support UHD media in any form.
Stacey Spears, formerly of Microsoft, is not a salesman. His titles at Microsoft were Senior Software Development Engineer in Test, Senior Test Lead, Software Development Engineer in Test, Program Manager, and Software Test Engineer. He is by any conceivable measure an expert in video decoding/rendering and was involved in every aspect of video output in the Xbox One from the start.
Masayasu Ito's title is EVP of Hardware Engineering and Operation for Sony Computer Entertainment, not "salesman".
The list goes on and on. Who is a more reliable source: knowledgeable, technical people with intimate familiarity with this hardware, all of whom are saying the exact same thing, or jeff_rigby, with zero relevant experience and a habit of being laughed out of / banned from every technical forum under the sun for his outlandish, unsupported theories that he passes off as fact? I'm pretty sure I could cite Spears or Ito on Beyond3D without moderator action being taken against me; can the same be said about what you post?
What carries more weight: relevant people at these companies expressly responding to questions about Ultra HD Blu-ray playback, or piecemealing together a theory based on words at a time (you hate evidence that uses complete sentences) that are contradicted at every turn?
You said all that stuff about Stinkles and the viability of a Blu-ray drive firmware update, and that never actually happened. You insisted vociferously that the EU tested UHD playback in these devices before realizing you were wrong. You thought Bink was a new HEVC decoding package, which it's not, and that means you must not have played any games in the past couple of decades. (The Bink logo/notice appears at the start of literally thousands of games.) Ito said that a dedicated HEVC decoder is needed and that one could be added with a hardware refresh/die shrink, and you say he never said anything about hardware and that he's talking about firmware; it's right there in black and white! You take this quote from Phil Spencer about the Xbox One S:
Then we looked at what was happening, and we said there were some opportunities for us to do a little more. With upgrading the HDMI technology in the box, we're able to support 4K video streaming. So we said, okay, if we're going to support 4K video streaming, let's also put a UHD Blu-ray drive in there for 4K disc, so you can watch video in 4K. Just because where we were in technology, we saw that and we said, okay, let's make that possible.
...and say that this applies to the launch Xbox One too. What? The list of things you've misunderstood or misinterpreted is seemingly without end.
There was a prevailing opinion that a UHD blu-ray drive is a different animal with stronger laser and much more expensive. If nothing else that impression should have been debunked, any differences between a HD and UHD blu-ray drive are SOFTWARE that may require minor changes to the hardware or not for DRM reasons only as a BD-RE and BD-R drive can read a version 2 UHD disk.
How you can say "any differences are SOFTWARE" and "may require minor changes to the hardware" in the same breath is pretty WTF-ish. If it requires hardware changes, however minor, the differences are inherently not limited to a software update.
Really, though, Ito from Sony said that there's the lack of a dedicated HEVC decoder as well, and the issues may not end there.
