Someone I know wants to buy a blu-ray, but he wants a player that functions more as a total home entertainment center.
He wants one with wifi and LAN capabilities that can stream netflix and pandora, obtain media from other computers on the LAN (like the desktop where he keeps his music files) and that can also have an external hard drive attached directly to the blu-ray to listen to music or movies that are stored on the external HD.
I recommended a PS3 since that sounds like it has all those things plus gaming capabilities. But that costs about $200-300. Are there any other blu-ray players that offer these things for ~$100?
I don’t think so. A PS3 is his best bet. You can probably find a 40gb PS3 on eBay for cheap, but there’s no guarantee on how old it is. I’d spend an extra $75 and just get a new slim model.
Look on ebay. I found one that does all that for less than $100 at the time. The Sony-BDP-BX37. They are currently about $80 on ebay. The only downside is a lack of built-in wifi, but that wasn’t a deal breaker for me.
The budget might not be blow on a home theater PC if he can re-purpose one of his other PC’s, or cannibalize parts.
A Home theater PC will do TV time shifting and recording, blu-ray, DVD and blu-ray storage, stream netflix, amazon video on demand, just about anything, AND it cna play games. Talk about total entertainment.
I can’t recall the make or model of my Blu-Ray player, but it has a similar level of versatility and I got it at the beginning of the year for $150.
I think the pitfall in these cheap players is that they don’t play Blu-Ray discs well. I’m extrapolating based on my own experience, but while mine plays DVDs just fine and streams Netflix and Youtube videos perfectly, it tends to hitch on nearly all the Blu-Ray discs I try to play except those I just took out of the packaging for the first time. Blu-Rays from Netflix tend to be nearly impossible to get through without skipping at least one chapter, even if the disc looks blemish-free. Given that the Blu-Ray part is the expensive part of the player, I’m guessing that’s what they skimp on to make these things affordable.
I find that the cheapest players skimp on the mechanical parts: the drive tray motors, the frame, and so on, as well as the electronics. As you move up in price, the electronics improves before the mechanicals. My cheap-ass discount-store BD player wearily drags its loading tray shut when you push the button, and then takes forever to load and run a movie. Presumably more expensive players will be faster at these tasks. On the other hand, in the world of DVDs at least, often the cheaperst players were the most versatile.