I recently received the LG BD-390 after a lot of research on various other BluRay DVD players. I was not so much interested in the WiFi capability as I knew I was going to used it wired to get the maximize throughput when streaming. Most of my research pointed me to this BD-390 for speed, picture quality and network streaming capability. The things I wanted most from this DVD player was the Netflix and network streaming of my home videos and pictures.
First impression on the video quality: Amazing. You will not be disappointed with the image quality on this thing. Simply amazing.
Setting this unit up was very, very simple (other than the Nero Software on my PC - more on that later). I was able to turn this player on, go to the NetFlix setup, tell it that I was an existing NetFlix customer, it gave me a code, I then use my laptop to visit [...] and activate it. Once I hit the submit button on [...] to activate my new device (DVD player), I look up at my screen, and the DVD player immediately starts to show my own Watch Instantly Movie Queue. Done! That simple.
I was then very interested in the video quality when streaming Netflix videos. I was not blown away, but it was very good. A SD Netflix movie looks good. A HD Netflix movie looks pretty good! However, I have not received "full" bars on the indicator that tells me my network connection. I am usually at 75% so you might get even better picture quality if you have a faster network (I am currently at 3-4Mbs.
I then tried a standard DVD disc to see what the upscaling looked like since I read some reviews that it even makes standard DVDs look good. I was a little skeptical at first, BUT WOW! Watching a standard DVD looks close to HD (not really but its SUPER detailed and clear - you WILL notice a huge difference from your old DVD player).
So - now for the downfall, it might not be a huge deal for you. I really wanted to easily stream videos/pictures/music from my PC to this DVD player (as it states is one of its features). It comes with Nero MediaHome 4.0 software which you need to install on your PC. The program will automatically detect your networked DVD player - which it does if you can get it installed. Installing it was bit of a challenge (had to reinstall, uninstall, gets Nero's Clean tool to wipe out all Nero products and reinstall). But I finally got it installed. I recommend just installing the Nero MediaHome 4.4 software from the Nero website and not the version you get on the CD. Although, to get your serial number you may have to at least start the install from the CD since it shows you your serial number on one of the first steps, but you can just copy it down and then cancel the installation and then use the downloaded setup. Anyway, the Nero MediaHome service was running and I started the software and it asked me if I would like to setup which folders I plan on sharing. I selected "My Pictures" folder which has thousands of pictures. It then starts the indexing process....simple enough...but then crash! The indexing hangs and I noticed the MediaHome service is no longer running (via Services in Control Panel). I attempt to simply restart the service manually and it tells me that the service cannot start and that the program was not installed properly and I need to reinstall. Now I am back to the uninstall, reinstall, Nero CleanTool hell. I finally get it back installed and I tell it to index a small subset of pictures and it completes. I go over to my TV and I can see the pictures from my DVD player. The interface to navigate the pictures/video is a little slow and clunky but seemed to work. Another issue - I am looking at a screen of thumbnails of my pictures on my DVD player and I see the small images. I select an image and I see my picture...looks great...nice and crisp. I then hit next to start going through the other pictures, and I get a big question mark (?) image for most of the rest of the images...like it can't find them. How can it find them to show me the small thumbnail image of my picture but not be able to show me the image. I am not sure if this is a Nero MediaHome issue or a LG-firmware issue. I then tried to add more picture and video folders to index....and BAM! The MediaHome service hangs...crashes and I am back to square one. Nero support is $[...] per minute which someone is a fool if they use. I just sent them an email on my first issue and they were helpful about the install problem. I have yet to ask them about this indexing/crash problem. So right now - this stream PC -> DVD player feature is useless - very disappointed.
So - in summary, I LOVE this DVD player - image quality is amazing! Netflix quality is very good! Other than the issue with the PC->DVD player stream you can not go wrong with this player.Get more detail about LG BD 390 Network Blu-ray Disc Player.
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