why am I apprehensive about buying a BluRay Player? - Page 2

Are you advocating it's okay to steal by downloading high-def rips on the internet, or are you talking about paying for high-def digital downloads where available from the studios? I hope it's not the former.

If you don't give a damn about Netflix or games my pick will be the Oppo BDP-83. BD/DVD playback is reference with SACD/DVDA support.

It's just so damn convenient, not to mention easy for the manufacturers/marketers to control after distribution.

The question is do you really care for any PS3 titles?

I would get a PS3 just for the games and the Oppo just for movies.

I believe in separate components.

Call me odd, but I have no attachment to hard copies. My only gripe is that the quality is low at the moment. Once there is 1080p streaming, I will be more than happy to ditch the stack of discs.

Perhaps it is because I rarely watch a movie more than once. Even for my favorite movies, I only watch them 2-3 times. Seems silly to pay $20 to own a movie you can get from netflix for no additional cost above the subscription.

The 83 as all Oppos I have tried, mainly all of them have still some issues to resolve by them, I'm still in the middle of trying to solve some of them, handshakes, frozen titles, etc...some of them have been resolved via firmware upgrades, others still persist...

About the protected content on the internet, I see it this way, if you have the money to purchase the music, or the DVDs you will get them in the stores, and if you do not, you will not get them regardless of price...That is why the p2p was created and all this stuff of the torrents etc...and will survive regardless of what they will do, and regardless of it is illegal or not, and if you have no means you will try to get them there...and they make profits good enough to cover this loss, so do not worry...I rarely download anything, and while I do, is just to see if I like it or not, if not I will not get it, but if I do I will purchase it...period....

I'm mostly concerned about music. I am the same way as you with movies, watch 'em once or twice and I'm done. Netflix on my Xbox is the most wonderful thing.

I'm thinking about getting a Blu-Ray player, too. A friend has one and the videos are stunning.

I find netflix playback on my Samsung BD-P3600 to be highly unreliable. Yes. i have the latest firmware.

I can compare my BD-P3600 with my Roku N1000 directly, see, and the Roku comes out on top easily. Except it can't play discs.

I find that if i pause or rewind some netflix streams, the samsung gets confused about where i am in the stream, and sometimes locks up. This has never, ever happened on the Roku, but happens with about half the streams i play on the samsung.

There are also streams that play with choppy audio or video on the Samsung that are flawless on the Roku.

Aside from netflix, the bd-p3600 is supposed to be able to play files off of a shared network drive - and it does, sort of. Even mkv files made from ripped blu-ray titles. Kind of.

It doesn't do upnp, it has to find an smb share on your network.

In the early firmware versions, you had to have just one computer with just one shared folder on your network or it wouldn't work at all.

They got over that, but it turns out that it has to be a windows machine. And it has to have simple file sharing turned off. And you have to log in as a user with a password which has write permissions, even though it should never need them. You can't just use a read-only guest account.

If you have a linux server (which includes almost all NAS solutions), you have to enter the ip address, username, password, and share path manually. And until the very latest version, it doesn't remember those at all after you turn it off.

In the latest firmware, it remembers them, but you still have to go through the manual setup screens every time you want to play something off the network share and just press 'save' on every screen.

Oh, and there is no bookmark feature at all when you're playing off a network share. If the doorbell rings and you hit pause, chances are by the time you make it back to your movie it will have already given up on waiting for you to un-pause it and just turned itself off, and you have to go through the setup screens and find the file and fast-forward manually to finish it.

Edit: Almost forgot! The BD-P3600 also comes with a remote that has small, fiddly buttons that sometimes don't seem to respond properly, and sometimes seem to send a command more than once. Even with fresh batteries. The older samsung models had a bigger remote with all the same (but bigger) buttons that was much better, but not as pretty. Form over function seems to be a theme with the latest samsung blu-ray products.

Between that and the BD-P2550 i bought used - which is FAR worse than the 3600 - Samsung has lost me as a customer. Possibly forever.

I work in software quality assurance. That's been the bulk of my career. Samsung has demonstrated that they have no interest in releasing quality software. Their high-end blu-ray products have obviously received little to no QA effort, even on the scale of 'monkey testing', let alone an actual quality assurance process.

I'm going to sell the BD-P2550 for parts (because it doesn't work worth a damn) and hold onto the BD-P3600 until the Panasonic BD65 hits the market, and then flip the 3600 on ebay.

And most likely never buy a Samsung product again, unless I see a serious turn-around in the quality of their software.

Oh, as for real reasons to be apprehensive about buying a blu-ray player:

1: Technology is still advancing a bit, and even a lot of the 2009 models don't process the DTS-HD MA audio, which means that even though there's a lossless-compressed 7.1 audio stream on the disc, you get the 1.5mbps DTS because your blu-ray deck can't decode the lossless stream to push it over HDMI as PCM. This is not the same thing as Dolby TrueHD (but I hear there are models that can't hack TrueHD either).

2: With regard to #1, BD-J titles with java coding in them (which is almost all new releases) often expose bugs in the blu-ray players which have to be fixed with a firmware update. This is just like the early days of DVD, but with a more feature-rich programming language for more interesting bugs.

3: With regard to #2, sometimes tackling major changes in the technology (like DTS-HD MA and pointless upgrades like 'BD Live') require hardware upgrades, so the upgrade cycle of the hardware is faster than we used to see in DVD players when they were new. This means that it's highly likely that some hardware vendors will be distracted with new hardware and decide to just ignore the device you paid $250 for less than a couple years ago when firmware upgrades are required to play new titles. Already, Samsung appears to have stopped releasing title-specific fixes for 2008 models that were still in stores as recently as 6 months ago.

Neither my parents nor I had any motivation to make a jump to Blu-Ray. I'm quite content with DVDs as they are cheaper and my video system is pretty lo-fi to begin with (don't really have the space/desire right not to go all out on an audio/video system). My parents are have a lo-fi system in their bedroom and while the main system they keep was up-to-date when they bought it, we haven't upgraded it in 9 years. They finally got tired of squinting to make things out on their small TV across their bedroom so dad finally bought a large 40" LCD for their room. When he and I were looking through them, he asked me what my thoughts on Blu-Ray were and I told him straightforwardly that he would probably see more of the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray now with his new TV than before with the old one, and if he really wanted, we could just buy a cheap player. He bought a JVC for about $100 and I bought him and my mom Planet Earth on Blu-Ray and now, the entire family is hooked!