Request: Experience of blu-ray players

[Paul Adams]

It's been a while since I bought anything "home cinema"-wise - in fact I'm still using the same setup I made ~4 years ago:
- Philips 32PF9986 32" widescreen LCD TV (1080i, 768p)
- Samsung HD945 DVD player (soft hacked for region unlocking)
- Marantz SR8500 A/V Amp (DVI in/out, not HDMI)
- Mordaunt-Short 'Genie' 5.1 speakers

I love the ambilight feature of the Philips TV, so I am currently musing over the Ful-HD 42" 100Hz 1080p flavour as an upgrade.

Then comes the question of HD content, which is where I have zero up-to-date knowledge, except that HD-DVD fell on its arse and now "Everybody Loves Blu-raymond". Apparently.

So I see the blu-ray format went for regions, similar to DVD, only "A", "B" and so on instead of 1-6.
And the hacked region-free ones seem ridiculously expensive compared to the retail ones.

What scares me the most is the quoted "power-on to menu" and "power-on to film playback" times - they seem insanely long!
My experience with digital-out (DVI/HDMI) DVD players has been bad enough, the things seem so slow to start up or turn off, but the blu-ray player equivalents sound like they make them seem like lightning...


So for those that made the switch to blu-ray (and not just to get a PS3), what is your perception of the player you bought?
And are you locked into blu-ray region "B" and DVD region "2"?
Do you have enough time to make a cup of coffee between inserting a disc and it being ready to actually play?

[MSIC]

I hope this isn't too 'off-topic' for you, as i have no blu-ray experience, but i was reading a review on good ol' TrustedReviews of the Samsung F1080, and then whilst wandering around in John Lewis i saw this upscaling a DVD of Empire Strikes Back, and oh - my - god I was blown away - could have told me it was Blu Ray and i'd have been impressed by the quality!

I then saw it for sale later that day at Costco for £45 (regular price apparently for them), so snapped it up.
Don't yet have an LCD TV, but will get one imminently.
Plus it plays DivX perfectly, is small, lightweight, quiet etc etc.
A real bargain.

Edit: That link isnt to the right player, and in fact i cant find the F1080 on TR any more (my mind playing tricks?). Still, it's a great HDMI-outputting little device.

[bigblue]

Originally Posted by Paul Adams

What scares me the most is the quoted "power-on to menu" and "power-on to film playback" times - they seem insanely long!

They can be. The PS3 used to be the quickest, by quite a way, but I think the pack are catching up now.

So for those that made the switch to blu-ray (and not just to get a PS3), what is your perception of the player you bought?

I bought the PS3 primarily for video. Blu-Ray was obviously the main attraction, but it also upscales SD DVD relatively well, though not as well as all the sensationalist posts on AV sites would have you believe. It upscales better than my HDTV or my Sony DVD recorder though.

I'm very impressed with the performance. Only thing I don't like is that it doesn't have multi-channel analogue outputs, so hooking it up to anything other than a HDMI amp means you'll need to send audio via optical, which can't transfer HD audio streams. Might be an issue if you're using an older amp.

The image quality with Blu-ray is very good, haven't really tried any standalone players that beat it by much of a margin. And many of the standalone players lose out in other ways, such as disc loading, difficulty to upgrade firmware, not being HDMI 1.3 compliant, not being the latest Blu-Ray 'profile', etc.

The PS3 is also a pretty mean media streamer, and of course, it has the odd decent game too

Do you have enough time to make a cup of coffee between inserting a disc and it being ready to actually play?

Not with PS3 anyway, with others... probably

I just went downstairs and loaded a disc, just for you I switched the PS3 on by inserting the disc, and I had the movie playing in about 50 secs, including button presses, menus, skipping trailers, etc. In real-world use, there isn't much of a 'lag' with the PS3. But with cetain others, you would most definitely notice it.

[Paul Adams]

Cheers guys, I think I'll hang on a while with the player & amp upgrades - at least until I know the dust has settled on the HDMI version 1.x issue, and maybe the pricing & choice of blu-ray players is better.

[2Cold Scorpio]

It should be noted that the PS3 is the only Blu-Ray player than can be updated (at the moment). With a simple firmware update, it was updated to use Blu-Ray 2.0 profiles (at the time, no other Blu-Ray player supported 2.0. This may have changed by now, of course, but still...).

If I were to buy a Blu-Ray player today, it'd be the PS3. It may or may not look better than standalone players (I don't know...Blu-Ray on the PS3 looks really, really nice and so do DVDs, but i haven't compared it to standalone BR players), but the fact that it is fast and future-proofed is a big plus to me.

[shaithis]

I was a major advocate of HD-DVD, mainly due to the region-freeness of it.

I have imported well over 400 US, Japanese and Korean DVDs, so multi-region was a must-have for me.

So, when HD-DVD died, I was pretty upset and bought a PS3 to tie me over until region-free players become the norm.

The PS3 is a very good Blu-Ray player. The only downside I have found with it is that its difficult to get a programmable remote working with it (I'm quite a fan of the Harmony remotes), so I have to use the pad to navigate.......VERY annoying when your foot/cat/cuppa knocks a shoulder button by accident half-way through a film

In the end I got sick of most region A releases not working in my region B PS3 (and a lot of them are just not released in region B or have sub-standard soundtracks due to them cramming soundtracks on the disc for all of Europe), coupled with Sony paying off the studios to become Blu-Ray exclusive to win the war, I got so frustrated with their practices that I now just download all Blu-Rays from usenet and either stream them to the XBox360 or convert them to AVCHD to be played in the PS3 (depending on the format they were uploaded in).

[FifthFreedom]

The single best way to play Bluray DVD's is via a HTPC without a doubt.

You can build your own for £300 or less and you have so much more choice when it comes to outputs, inputs, firmware and regions its definately the way to go if your tech savy.

You can get Bluray drives for £70 now e.g. http://www.saverstore.com/productinf...7&rstrat=13321

I wouldn't buy from there but SCAN seem not to have any cheap ones in stock.

[Paul Adams]

Originally Posted by FifthFreedom

The single best way to play Bluray DVD's is via a HTPC without a doubt.

Actually I have been looking at this option as an alternative, as I could replace my DVD player before the TV, and check I can the HDMI & coaxial outputs functioning through my amp & current TV.

I am currently looking at:
Chassis: Silverstone SST-LC20
PSU: Corsair 550W
Motherboard: Asus P5E-VM HDMI
CPU: Intel Core2 Duo E8500
RAM: 2x2GB OCZ DDR2 PC6400
Graphics: Asus Radeon HD 3650 512MB DDR2 Silent
HDD: Samsung SpinPoint T166 400GB SATA2
TV Tuner: Hauppauge WinTV-HVR1100MCE
OS: Vista x86 Home Premium
(the above comes pre-built from Komplett, as I am lazy, and the items below would be added by me)
Player: LG GGW-H20L Blu-Ray-writer HD-DVD reader
WLAN: D-Link RangeBooster N USB Adapter, 802.11n
Software: AnyDVD HD, PowerDVD

Aiming for quiet, powerful, DVD/HD-DVD/blu-ray playback and completely region-free.

(While the micro-ATX board has a G35 IGP, it's not got acceleration for blu-ray HD playback so I figured a fanless PCI-E card would be useful.)

The wireless networking gives options for streaming FRAPS movies from my file server (I already have a Squeezebox for MP3s), the TV tuner is for possible future use.

With 6x3.5" bays I might also look at expansion for PVR capabilities later, but recording TV isn't something I have done for years.

That's the current theory anyway, I have plenty more research to do, and not in any particular rush.

[FifthFreedom]

Sounds good mate. Those parts should do what you need easily and efficiently.

An HTPC is going to be my next purchase also...

[Funkstar]

Paul, have you looked at the AMD 780G based motherboards?

They have Radeon 3600HD graphics embeded (you can also replace this by adding another card, or use it in CrossFire configuration) along with HDMI/DVI output.

Boards can be had for about £50, and are very low power, mine is pasively cooled.

[Jay]

I run a HD HTPC with DVD / HD-DVD and Blu-ray playback

its a AM2 3800+ X2, silent 8600GT, 2GB RAM and Vista Ultimate on a 80GB HDD, its been flawless and 1080i and I have ran it on a 1080P TV with no issues as well. The inital setup was a bit of a pain but well worth it.

[Paul Adams]

Got my HTPC set up a few days ago - swapped out the supplied DVD-RW drive and plonked in the HD-DVD/Blu-ray drive and went through the installation of Vista Ultimate plus the required drivers, PowerDVD 7 Ultra OEM, AnyDVD HD and WinTV.

HD-DVD & blu-ray playback through PowerDVD working very nicely, complete with 5.1 sound as I'm using the digital out to my amp rather than decoding on the box itself (OEM version of PowerDVD is 2CH only).

WinTV hooked up to my STB using RF & composite connections is able to see the free channels and the tuned channel selected on the STB, PVR functions seem to work just fine too.

Vista connected to my WLAN without any problems and located the shared media resources on my file server, now added to the media library.

DVD playback in Media Center working perfectly.


Only stumbling block so far is getting a picture from the TV card in Media Center - it picks up the connections from the Hauppauge card, but selecting Composite 1 only gives me audio, no picture.
Given WinTV is working okay, I'm not sure what the problem there is, but it's no great shakes as I rarely watch TV anyway, and almost never have to record 1 channel whilst watching another.

[Howard]

I disagree that an HTPC is the best way of playing bluray as you couldn't until very recently when Asus (I think) released a card, output the new surround formats. If you have one of these cards and a compatible amp however, you're fine

I love my player though. Looks and sounds stunning.


Oh and there are three Bluray regions btw, A, B and C.