Little Toys for Little Boys

Chris took the PlayStation 3 back to his apartment for this semester at UNCG. So I found myself without a Blue Ray DVD Player in the Great Room. I wasted a couple of hours on Saturday after watching the Pitt-Louisville game (what a comeback - woo-hoo!) researching Blue Ray players at AVS Forum (which is a totally awesome site for AV gear).

Blue Ray adoption has historically been slowed by the high cost of BR DVDs and associated players as well as the format war with HD DVD. That war ended last year and the cost of players has come down quite a bit.

I was completely satisfied with the PS3 as a BR player, so it had been awhile since I had surveyed the lay of the land in BR players. The PS3 had decent disk load times, built-in wireless, and supported automatic updates of the player for new codecs and function.
Streaming media seems to be a big feature now, with many of the players in the $250 - $300 range supporting either wireless or hardwired Internet and the ability to stream movies or music from various content providers.

I settled on the Sony BDP-N460. This thing has been out since last fall and a ton apparently were bought for Christmas. So I figured that there would be an adequate volume of customer feedback and reviews for it. Sure enough, there is a healthy review thread on AVS with mostly positive reviews. (As with any piece of consumer electronics, there will always be the perspectives at either end of the spectrum that you need to filter.)

The N460 supports the latest lossless audio formats (not currently useful to me as I am pairing this with my old Pioneer VSXD814 which doesn't support HDMI). But it is a nice feature that will come in handy when my theater room upstairs is finally completed. The N460 supports streaming from a bunch of content providers, with the big ones being Netflix, You Tube, and Slacker (internet radio). The complete list of content providers is pretty extensive, but the consensus is that a lot of the content is not that interesting. The upscaler for standard DVDs seemed to be adequate from the reviews. This player isn't in the class of the Oppo BDP-83, but at half the price looked like a nice package with streaming support.

So I pulled the trigger and picked one up at Best Buy on Sunday. Unfortunately, the N460 supports only hardwired Ethernet, so now I have a dilemma. My Netgear WNR2000 Wireless-N Router is upstairs in the Master Bedroom (along with the TW Cable Modem and Vonage Telephone Adapter). So my choices are to:

• Snake CAT5 from the router through the bedroom wall up into the attic, then down to the crawlspace and up to the entertainment center where the N460 is going to sit.
• Use a Wireless Bridge

Now I have actually done a lot of that type of work upstairs in my house. I installed a Zon Audio 4-room distributed audio system in all 4 bedrooms. This required installation of in-ceiling speakers and in-wall controllers and that system is all based around CAT5 and speaker wire. So I am very familiar with and comfortable with that work. I have also done a bunch of low-voltage wiring upstairs for the infamous 3 year-old home theater project (more on that in another post).

One thing I have never tried to do is run low-voltage wiring between the crawlspace and the attic.     Hardwiring the connection would be preferable for streaming Internet audio and video, but I really didn't feel like such a major project, so I wimped out and decided to just use a wireless bridge. This will allow me to keep everything where it is at. Simple matter of:

• Placing the bridge in the entertainment center.
• Configuring the bridge to talk to the router.
• Plug the N460 into the bridge.
• Configure the N460 to use the bridge.

But which bridge? So that required more research and lots of questions and doubts start to enter into my mind? Which bridge provides the best value? Will the bridge work with the N460? Will the bridge work with my Wireless-N Router? And I am already paying for a new player and now I need yet another networking device in the system. Is this streaming content stuff all that it is really cracked up to me? And what if the streaming really needs a hardwired Ethernet Connection to work well? Maybe I should just snake the wire? Why did Chris take the PS3 and isn't there a better way to be spending a Sunday afternoon?

Eventually I calm down and decide on the DLINK DAP-1522 - quick stop at CompUSA in Durham. Back home and after about 15 minutes, I have everything configured and working. For some quick test runs, I pop in the BR disks for No Country For Old Men (beautifully shot movie) and Fargo (can you tell that I love Coen Brothers flicks?). Looks and sounds great.

Played around a little bit with Slacker and You Tube streaming. Pretty nice interface and the wireless bridge seems to be working out OK.  Overall, first impressions of the player are very favorable and I am a happy camper.

Next up will be a trial offer of Netflix to determine the quality of the integration between Netflix streaming service and the N460. On their cheapest monthly plan, Netflix apparently offers unlimited streaming of movies, so that just might be the ticket - but I am leaving that for another day.