Discount LG BD 390 Network Blu-ray Disc Player

Everybody knows this is a Blu-Ray DVD player, enough of that.

I have to write about how this unit has impressed me with features besides the fact that it can play a Blu-Ray DVD. This unit is advertised that it can connect to your home network via wireless (or Ethernet) but what it doesn't say is how well this was pulled off. First, the unit is running a Linux OS accompanied by some excellent companion software. When I booted this unit up, the first thing I did was setup the wireless network and downloaded the latest firmware update. Then I went to My Media from the default start screen if no DVD in in the player. It gave me a little warning about connecting to a wireless network may have performance issues (maybe I can disable this). Then I saw all the shared folders on my home network (multiple computers). The DVD player let me browse all our shared folders for all kinds of media. Let me tell you it does it all, I viewed pictures, played songs, watched music videos, some were HD but others were meant for iPod, so yeah it didn't look to great on a 50" TV but everything I could find played as good as could be expected.

Now for the real test. High quality videos over wireless. This is what impressed me the most. As long as your wireless connection is faster than this units need to feed on the media stream, it does wonderfully. I tested .avi files, .mkv files, mp4 files, and it eats them all with joy. I tried a wide variety of resolutions and file sizes and still it isn't picky about what you feed it. Here is a good test to know if your wireless network is fast enough to feed this unit or not (requires two wireless computers). A typical HIGH quality (720p) one hour TV show is about 1 GB, so if you can copy a 1 GB file from one device to another in less than an hour, you're in luck. Thus, in theory if you can copy over 4 GB an hour between devices you could watch a full length 1080p movie via a wireless connection. Trying this will be my next test.

Now for YouTube and actually accessing the internet with this unit, I have to say it works, but it isn't really practical. It's a great novelty item but wears off quick. Maybe someday all of our appliances will talk to the internet, but for now our best bet is to feed this unit from inside your home network via another computer. Oh yeah, did I mention it plays any media you can throw at it via the USB port in the front of the machine too? Basically this DVD player is a Linux computer with every CODEX I could think of pre-loaded. Last but not least it plays burned movies from common movie maker software. If you ever get bored discovering all the things you can do with this unit I suppose you can try playing a regular DVD, which I haven't even tried yet.

UPDATE Sept 8, 2009: I found an .AVI file that the player could not play, it showed 0 bytes. However it played on the computer fine. I converted the file to an .MP4 and it had no problem with that. I have also noticed that the video and audio begin to lose sync on some (not all) .AVI files, while .MKV files play the best every time.

My test with streaming 1080p over wireless proved unsuccessful. I ran a cable and it worked great though. So the best my wireless can do is streaming 720p resolution. All in all this is a GREAT player.Get more detail about LG BD 390 Network Blu-ray Disc Player.