After years sitting on the sideline watching what will probably be the last physical format war for video I have finally decide to get me some blu-ray.
My setup at home is best described as modest, consisting of speakers I bought about 15 years ago, a receiver I bought second hand from my a/v obsessed brother-in-law at least three receivers ago for him.
My TV is a 50″ panasonic plasma, alas only a 1366×768 panel, but a good performer.
I have a few devices already hooked up including an AppleTV that I use for “Channel BT” content, a TiVo and a BeyonWiz DP-S1 for over the air TV broadcasts.
Prior to this purchase I was using a cheap-ass Tevion DVD player from Aldi, the jaggies it added to my movies nearly made my eyes bleed.
I plugged the new guy in, I had to shut off the TiVo for the moment due to a lack of cables, the BeyonWiz is looking after me, and found that I needed to apply a firmware update, no great surprise.
At the moment I have no Blu-ray discs to try so all I’ve done is check out some DVDs and the in built YouTube access.
I spun up “The Two Towers” and was really impressed with the image quality, the player was upscaling to 1080p.
The player is badged as a region 4 DVD but just for fun I threw in my region 1 copy of “Apollo 13” and bugger me, the disc played with no problems.
The image quality on “Apollo 13” was not as good as “The Two Towers” there was a lot of grain but I think that it was always like that.
I tried out YouTube and although it works the UI was pretty craptacular. I can already watch YouTube content on my AppleTV and my iPhone so I can live without the feature on my Blu-ray player.
The player can also handle DivX, BUT, only via USB or off a disc. There is a fraking Ethernet jack on the back, would it have killed then to add an smb client?
My BeyonWiz and my AppleTV can handle DivX just fine so again I can happily live without this feature on the Blu-ray.
I look forward to sampling some Blu-ray content in the not too distant future.
Hint: it’s my birthday next month 😉
I’ll post again later when I’ve partaken of some Blu-ray goodness.
