It is true that the PS3 can't use an infrared remote without some kind of IR to Bluetooth transceiver, but I prefer the RF remote that I don't have to point directly at the component.
As for bitstreaming audio, this is what I was talking about as a technical limitation of Oppo's player. You don't bitstream video. The video is decoded from the disc and combined with pop-up menus or pic-in-pic special features or what ever is offered by the Blu-ray spec, then it is sent as decoded pixels over the HDMI link. No one thinks twice about that, it is just how it is done.
Bitstreamed audio was a hack that came about during Laserdisc times, when an additional audio format was shoehorned onto the disc without it being part of the original specification, much like DTS on audio CDs. It continued to exist on DVDs as there was still no way to deliver multi-channel audio in a digital format. The S/PDIF interface only supports two PCM channels.
Now in the age of Blu-ray and HDMI, we have a method of transferring at least 8 PCM channels across one wire. There's no reason to move the raw data from the disc. Additionally, Blu-ray discs have the ability to mix audio from multiple sources before sending it out of the player. Very much the same thing as the pop-up menu over the live video. But if the audio is being streamed off the disc there's no way to do any live manipulation of that data. It has to first be decoded into PCM. This is the proper way for a play to handle BDs, decode the compressed track, and output multi-channel PCM.
The Oppo player doesn't have a powerful enough DSP chip to decode the lossless (Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD MA) track and then be able to do the realtime mixing. So it instead uses the lossy "core" tracks when any mixing is requested. Oppo's tech support says to disable all secondardy audio mixing so you're guaranteed to get the lossless track. That's a work around which prevents the full support for the Blu-ray spec. Plus a disc can force audio mixing through BD-Java, then the player's preference is ignored and you get the lossy track.
Many people don't like the secondary audio mixing, or BD-Live for that matter. I don't disagree with those opinions, but at the same time I want a player which can provide every part of the BD standard. Right now the PS3 is the only player I know which can do everything. Though I believe other's with lossless + 2nd audio are in the pipeline (or may have been recently released). Oppo's player just doesn't have the hardware to do it, so it won't be showing up in a firmware fix.
