A question for blu-ray owners.

It might depend on the player.  What did you get?  I just got one for Xmas too - Sony BDP-S360 - and there are a lot of set-up options.  Right now, everything is on whatever the player's "default" is, but as I fool with it I'll get into the details and start adjusting things manually.

Flip thru your instruction booklet and see what you find.

It is probably the same as DVD players. Not all DVD players remember your position in the film after turning the power off. My Philips DVD player I have had for years doesn't. As long as I leave the power on, it will remember the position, but once I hit the power button to turn it off, I have to manually find the spot I left off at once I wish to resume watching. 

I doubt it would be something you can change in the settings, if a Blu-ray player had the ability to remember where you left off at, it wouldn't make any sense to have an option to disable that feature. What reason would someone have for ever wanting to turn that feature off?

Well, I'll tell you why someone would want to disable that.  My new computer's DVD software (well, one of them) does always remember the location of every disc I play.  When I rented Birth of a Nation, the extras disc was pretty badly scratched up.  It got to a part where it wouldn't play, but I couldn't do anything about it because every time I would put the disc back in, it would go straight back to the part.  I finally just had to open it in VLC to watch it at all.  I wish I knew how to disable it at will.

Interesting, Murry.  So maybe it's a coding on the disc that tells the player whether or not to remember the position rather than being a programming feature of the player?

That almost makes more sense, as some discs won't let you hit the "Menu" button during the FBI warning or previews and others will.

I have an HP BD-2000 from QVC, and it remembers EVERYTHING.  I have literally been watching an episode of Star Trek on on BR, ejected it, watched several episodes of Friends on DVD, turned the power off, watched a rented movie the next day that was scratched up and had to eject and clean several times, put the same Friends disc back in and have it remember right where we left off, put in another disc of Friends and finally put the Trek BR back in and it plays right where I left it.

It must be the players that make the difference.  I got really lucky with mine.

After playing a bit yesterday, I think my Trek movie BRs don't remember, but my Trek season BRs did.  Interesting.

I tested this with a standard DVD player and it only remembers the position if the unit was directly powered off while the disc was playing.  Haven't tested it with my new BD player yet, but I'm guessing it will work the same way.

Resume Information is a little bit more complicated than that.  On HDMV titles, the Author decides whether Resume information will be stored or discarded for a certain title - you can only store the resume information for one title, so if you jump from the main feature into an extra, and resume information is held for the extra, it will overwrite the resume information for the main feature.

The PS3 in general is a funny beast, and I think you sometime have better luck hitting triangle on a video / dvd than x as this may give you options of "PLAY" or "PLAY FROM BEGINNING".

Where things get tricky with Blu-ray is on discs which are authored using BD-J which appears to be more and more titles - I believe if they wish to add some BD LIVE functionality.

By default, there is no resume information with BD-J as you are effectively running a programe on the disc, what is sometimes called a "Finite State Machine".  When you stop the program that is it, the application stops.

What more and more BD-J developers are doing is 'capturing' the STOP command on your remote, and recording the disc's state to the player's persistent storage - Current Title, Time, Audio Track, Subtitle Track etc.

When you next press play, the disc is programmed to check if there is any information in persistent storage.

At least, I believe that is the theory!!

I have found that my PS3 remembers or "resumes" well enough.  I've only noticed it on Harry Potter 1 (since it took about 6 sittings with the kids to finish it) and Terminator Salvation.