Reports of my demise have been slightly exaggerated. It's been a really hectic year so far for me, and my time online has been very limited lately.

I know both Outlaw and OPPO pretty well. The two have a lot in common, but they also operate in different ways in some regards. OPPO, for example, does not operate a company forum. There are threads at AVS and lots of other places that serve as support forums, but they are not company-hosted. Also, the BDP-83 isn't a "typical" example of how either company handles product development. In some cases, OPPO has allowed a player's beta testing status to be common knowledge, but normally no details about that beta process are allowed. More often than not, they have operated in a manner more like Outlaw. The DV-980H was released without any advance notice, and the BDP-80 was similar. The BDP-83 was in beta testing for months before beta testers were allowed to speak about it, and during the "open beta," when OPPO allowed customers to buy the player while firmware development was still being completed, there were actually two separate firmware development tracks ("T" for test that was used for internal testing, and "B" for beta that was used by paying customers). Discussion of the "B" firmware was open because it was available to customers, but discussion of "T" firmware was restricted to within the company and the testers who had signed NDAs. This was done because the "T" firmware was susceptible to show-stopping bugs, since it was being tested in part to find such bugs, while paying customers only got firmware that was considered unlikely to leave them unable to use the player they had paid for. New features also appeared in "T" firmware first, but could not be discussed publicly until they were in "B" firmware (and even then only discussed as far as they behaved within the "B" firmware). The BDP-93 was also in beta for some time before being publicly announced, and discussion of it by beta testers was not allowed until the player shipped.