DVD Player Reviews and Prices

(March 2011)
Internet Ready Devices

198 of 199 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of five stars Great Experience Streaming, Blu Ray & External File Playback, April 30, 2011
By Susurration “profmis” (PA United States) See all my reviews This review is from: LG BD670 3D Wireless Network Blu ray Disc Player with Smart TV (Electronics) Chose this model because it had streaming, DLNA, and wireless fitted (you do not need a separate dongle). I haven’t been disappointed in any of its functions. Wireless connectivity was a breeze setup was straightforward and this model accepts a 32 character WPA2 security key (unlike last LG TVs and Blu ray player models which were restricted to 18 20 characters, as I discovered when I bought a wireless dongle for our TV!). The wireless connection looks to be more stable than with the other wireless devices we have. I sometimes have to turn off and on again to get a connection on startup, but this is unsurprising given how flaky our router is . : )

Blu ray playback is really good. Our 1st Blu ray disc looked grainy and I was worried till I read different forum discussions that criticized this movie move. Many Blu ray movies are seemingly intentionally grainy because this duplicates the “film” experience that the director meant. You may be able to use the movie mode on your TV to decrease graininess as this lowers the sharpness setting. Our second Blu ray disc was really smooth and in depth, as were most of the other discs. Playback resolution is excellent, you may be able to see every pore on someone’s face and the depth of field is amazing. There were no stutters, freezes or glitches with any of the discs we played. DVD upscaling is good I decided it isn’t worth replacing any DVDs with Blu ray discs as the upscaled playback in 1080p looks just as good as Blu ray playback.

Wireless streaming from Netflix was totally painless, once I worked out that the “Netflix ESN” that the player gives in the network setup menu isn’t the code that you have to use for Netflix connection setup. You have to choose the LG Premium menu icon which accesses premium streaming services, choose Netflix and get the connection code from the setup menu there. Enter the code once on the Netflix web site (“Activate a Netflix prepared device” in your account settings) and Netflix streaming works automatically after that. Hopefully my experience will save other people hours of trying to connect with the wrong code! Netflix streaming is excellent quality, much better than broadcast TV for most shows. The player looks to stream seamlessly from Netflix with nearly no stutters or degraded resolution issues, for HD movies. The only issues I have seen are when my internet connection is congested (Comcast net access is pretty bad on Friday evenings and Saturdays in my area). I’m impressed.

A recent firmware update (April 2011) added Video on Demand, which also works great! it’s really cool to have these services. The device also offers Vudu, Pandora, Napster etc. But I have not used those. Firmware updates are easy, though these do take around 5 10 minutes to load via wireless connection you have to keep your nerve and not turn off the player, thinking nothing is happening. Sooner or later, you get a message saying that the download loaded and the player turns off and on again. If the download fails (which did happen once), the device isn’t influenced (good design).

I was really impressed by how painless it was to set up media streaming from a PC using DLNA. A copy of Nero Home Media Server essentials has been supplied on CD I installed this, the player automatically detected my PC and presented me with a list of files I could play from the media folder. This was so easy! DLNA file streaming worked brilliantly: I only experienced problems with one, big (10 GB) home movie file that stuttered and stopped. Then I discovered the USB connection on the right front panel of the player. I had been so taken with all of the streaming solutions that I overlooked the simplest way to play media files, which is from an external hard drive or flash drive! The BD670 played the big file from an external hard drive with no problems. Since then, the player played everything I have thrown at it: AVI and MKV, etc. Using lots of different codecs. With three firmware updates in the month that I owned it, I have many of confidence that it’s being updated constantly to play all of the new disc and file formats. So I’m a happy bunny indeed!

UPDATE: Hulu Plus just appeared on the premium services (network access) menu, as of the July 30th software update! I can not vouch for the quality, because I’m not a member. But the demo videos seem to play just good . : )

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182 of 191 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of five stars A Couple Steps Up From the BD390, But Not Perfect. (Yet), June 1, 2011
By Hectic (AL, USA) See all my reviews This review is from: LG BD670 3D Wireless Network Blu ray Disc Player with Smart TV (Electronics) I bought this player a month ago and wanted to wait and get many plentiful use time with it before I left a review. The LG BD670 is my second standalone blu ray player, where my 1st was the LG BD390 (2009 model). (It also really says something when in 2009 I paid $330 for the BD390, still only two years afterward pay only $154 for the BD670.) I decided to go with LG again because of my experience with past performance and they give all the features I want. As with most blu ray players like this one firmware updates are a must, so once I got the player connected to my network (wireless) I got it updated to the new firmware. So far I’m pretty impressed with most, but not all parts of this player. There are three major looking at techniques I use to watch videos with this player: discs (30), USB (30) and streaming/wireless (40). I will give in depth reviews of these since they are what I use.


DISCS: With both the capability to stream AND watch video files via the USB port (as with the 390) I do not watch as many discs as I use to. There are now of course two types of video discs, DVD and blu ray. What many people do not understand is that DVD and blu ray are two totally different formats, each with there own disc format. The only thing that they have in common (besides playing A/V streams) is that they both have the same SIZE disc.
Blu rays: See UPDATES @ the end of my review about this! When I 1st watched a blu ray on my BD390 paired with my (then new) Vizio 42″ 1080p 120Hz HDTV I certainly saw the improvement over DVD with a much sharper, clearer picture with more detail. In fact it on occasion sucks to have that much detail for many of the older/low budget movies that I have on blu ray because it lets you to see just how bad many of the special effects were (wires, etc.)! I thought the picture could not get any better on my Vizio because I thought that what the BD390 gived it was as good as what the TV could produce. Well, when I watched many of my blu rays on the same TV with the BD670.It turned out I was wrong! This player gives obvious improvement when it comes to playing blu rays when in comparison to the BD390. The picture IS really sharper/clearer and the colors are more vibrant; not in any great, vast improvement kind of way, but it’s obvious. I have played about a dozen or so blu rays on it far, but it is been able to play them all without any problems whatsoever.Say for one title (so far). “Daybreakers”. I know this title plays just good because the disc could play in the 390. When I put this disc in to play in the 670, it starts to load up the major menu with its movie icon/progress bar, but then stops about 3/4 of the way through. But the sound will continue to play for the trailers with just a small patch of the video on the screen showing next to half of the logo. I “next track” all of the trailers to attempt and get to the menu (pressing the “disc menu” button only gives me the “circle cross” icon telling me it can not do that), but once I am past all the trailers and the menu is suppose to load up.Nothing. It just sits there and does not load up anything. I called LG to make them aware of this problem and the woman I talked to said she could pass along this information to their firmware dept. And look into fixing the problem. (Who knows how long that may take though?!) Hopefully this one title is a rarity, but it makes me wonder out of the over 100 titles on blu ray I do own and have still to play on this machine, how many of those may meet this same kind of problem?
DVD’s: See UPDATES @ the end of my review about this! amazingly, this unit has a slight problem when it comes to playing DVD’s! You think the one thing they could get right for this player is to play DVD’s with no problems whatsoever, but sadly no. The audio/video plays good, but every chapter change there’s a half second skip in the play (more for the audio than the video). It is barely obvious, but it’s obvious. It is not enough to really annoy me, but I can understand other people being bothered by it. If it happened more frequently in the play, then it could most likely get on my nerves more. This is a problem that LG is already aware of and says is working to fix in a future firmware update, but still I contacted them via email about this just to add my complaint to the list. Other than that there’s no other problems I have experienced. The audio/video quality is great and every single DVD loads up and plays, many region 0/PAL DVD’s I got from Australia.

USB: This is the major reason I bought and have stuck with the LG model blu ray players. I have lots of USB flash drives, not to talk about external HD’s where I have all my media files backed up on, other things I download from different resources. I just move them to a flash drive and plug it into the port and start watching. This player is a bit different from the 390 in that the USB, not the disc source is the major source it defaults to. I can have a disc already loaded in the unit when I turn it on, still if you have a USB drive plugged in, it’ll ask if you want to play something from that 1st instead of loading up the disc. So far, it played every single video file/format (.Mkv, .Mpeg, .Avi, .Mp4, .M4v) I have thrown at it with no problems at all. I LOVE this capability.

Streaming/Wireless: Not only does this unit have the USB port up front to play video/music/picture files off of external drives, but with the wireless it has the capability to use DLNA to stream media from your computer (which I have not messed with still.) This unit has dual band wireless, meaning it uses both 2.4Ghz and 5.8Ghz bands. This is particularly useful for those who have a dual band router (such as myself), so there’s less chance of a dropped connection or decrease in connection speed. Usually all of the streaming I do with the 670 is from LG’s Premium service, i.E. Netflix, Pandora, etc. This is certainly where the 670 improved over the 390 with many more services and better interfaces. The interface menu for Netflix has very improved from the 390 with more choices to look up movies and easier navigation of the “instant queue”. The only other Premium service I have used so far is Pandora which is nice too. I have still to attempt out any of the other services, and do not plan to for the foreseeable future. I’ll note that when I 1st did the firmware update (no problems) then loaded up the Premium service, it started to do an update for the program, but said it failed and just loaded up Premium as normal. The second time I loaded it up it attempted the update again and was successful. All of the movies I have streamed played good with no dropped connections/rebuffering and the quality was at least DVD or better.


Overall, for the time being, I am pleased with this player; but only with the understanding that the problems it has will be fixed in future firmware update(s). As these blu ray players get more and more complex with all the different features they have, it also means there is more chance for different and unforeseen bugs like the ones this player still suffers from will pop up, hence the need for the firmware updates. I know some people believe that they should be like the old DVD players and just work straight out of the box and I wish they did too. In a perfect world they could, but this is far from a perfect world is not it? These players are becoming more and more like computers, different hardware and software meant to work together to do certain tasks without errors or conflicts. But anybody with a computer knows that it is not that easy. I modify/upgrade hardware and many programs (software) on my system all the time and on occasion these changes cause conflicts. A change in hardware, with the new drivers can cause unforeseen problems with other hardware or software. A new update to a driver can cause the hardware it is suppose to enhance to work less proficiently or program update can cause conflicts with other software. Most of the time this does not happen or may be easily resolved, but on occasion it does. This is the same for these new players. A firmware update meant to fix one issue can cause another. The businesses that make these players can only do so much beta testing before they have to release them into the real world. That’s when we, the buyer whom these devices are meant for, put them through their real world paces that the maker simply can not do. There are so many variations (different DVD’s, blu rays, vidoe files, streaming, etc.) made by different studios and other businesses that all use different manufacturing/specification standards that it could be virtually impossible for the manufacturers to attempt and test them all on these players, when they themselves have their own standards and plans. Read reviews for any other blu ray player out there now and I defy you to find one single player that has no complaints against it. I am not trying to defend this players shortcomings, I am just saying I understand (more than many people) why they exist and simultaneously am trying to make other people understand why they exist.

With this review I’m trying to tell you, the buyer about this player. It’s a good player and will be an better one once these small problems it has are fixed in firmware updates. If you purchase this player now, be aware of the aforementioned problems and be patient for the firmware fixes. If you’re turned off by these problems I experienced or problems mentioned by other reviewers which I haven’t experienced; either wait till these problems have been addressed to buy or simply look into purchasing a different player. Once firmware for these problems have been. Read more ›

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115 of 121 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of five stars good support samba linux mediatomb netflix vod pandora, April 11, 2011
By jerry uanino (shelton, Connecticut United States) See all my reviews () This review is from: LG BD670 3D Wireless Network Blu ray Disc Player with Smart TV (Electronics) Upsides: Pandora works nicely. Many other nice internet radio alternatives.
Netflix interface decent.
The best thing here is the SAMBA, CIFs or Windows file sharing (Whatever you call it) is nice. Works good with Linux, works good with MediaTomb upnp server. Could not find right transcoding alternatives, but did not need it. Good with mp4′s ripped h.264 and does mp3. Plays flip video files natively no problem. Pause, rewind, fast forward over streaming (cifs or upnp).
LCD display shows timecode when playing streams from samba or upnp.
Bought device to have single device for netflix and home media serving.
Plays mp3′s nicely.
Better than ROKU for me since it does SAMBA and UPNP for home streaming, was not clear if Roku did that.
Wi FI, wired.
Oh, and it plays BD’s too, I tested one, but not my main reason for buy.
Unit stays cool, is nice and small and does what I need.

Downsides: no screensaver in pandora, fearing burn in.
Menus kind of laggy.
No progress meter when updating firmware. LCD indicates updating but should have separate downloading and applying progress when installing firmware. Have seen samsung do this better with progress meter.

I’d like to add a special item here. LG you did this properly you have a sticker for support on the device. Wow. I love you. I called, human answers. No hold time. Sat, Sun, no problem. I had an issue with firmware 268.E inside three days there was a new 270 something to correct. 268.E added VOD for me and the other nifty things. Support was friendly, apologized and was nice to work with. I have never owned home electronics where they really had a support line with humans. And the humans called you back with updates on your problem!

First LG device I own. Mad props for the useful human support!

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