Archive for the ‘HD’ Category
I read some great reviews about this BluRay player and I really wanted something that had a fast startup time and BD Live 2.0 so I put the JVC XV-BP1 on my Christmas list. My wife was feeling like Santa this year so she got it for me and I was like a kid in a candy store, or maybe a kid on Christmas day would be more appropriate. The first Blu-Ray movie I tried was The Mask with Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz. It played great and the load times were as advertised, I was excited. Then I played another movie and the audio didn’t work on pass-through. It only worked if I set it to PCM-Multi. So now I’m nervous, I did my homework, my Magnavox Blu-Ray was junk so I justified the JVC. Let me try something else, so I pop in John Mayer’s Where The Light Is – Live In Las Vegas… Still no audio on passthrough it only works on PCM setting.
So I start looking on the Internet for others having this problem and it comes up blank, no hits. This can’t be true, am I really the only one? Next I jump over to the JVC site and search for firmware and I see that my firmware is 6 months old. Apparently this thing has been in the warehouse for awhile. I download the newest firmware, put it on my flash drive, boot the player, it installs and BAM! it works. Man am I happy. If you have this same issue be sure your flash drive is formatted FAT not NTFS or it won’t work.
You can get the firmware update for the XV-BP1 Blue-Ray Player at JVC Firmware Update.
The Magnavox NB500MG9 BluRay player looked like a great deal and things were going good for a month or two. When I upgraded my Netflix account to 3 movies at a time I started getting a lot of Blu-Ray Discs and I started to see that the player had issues. Many times the movie would freeze or jump ahead. I could not rewind or forward to see what I missed so I would unplug the player and start over and it seemed that it would do this at exactly the same spot every time. I would clean the disk, try again and it just would not play. I would have to go upstairs and borrow the kids PS3 to finish watching the movie. The latest failure is the 15th Anniversary Resevoir Dogs on Blu-Ray, no audio or video, period. Fire up the PS3 and no problem.
At the request of my wife I was updating my Christmas list and 2 of the first 3 movies I looked for are not out on BluRay yet. I was happy to see they released Man On Fire (Denzel Washington) but then I looked up Heat (Deniro, Pacino) and Collateral (Tom Cruise) and no luck. Still no Minority Report on Blu-Ray either, come on, is there really no demand, is everyone really buying Planet Earth and Kung-Fu Panda? I get the appeal and top ranking of movies like Ironman, it has something for everyone and Robert Downey Jr. has that special charisma that would have turned any 1950’s actor into a screen legend but some of these Blu Disk releases baffle me. Hollywood! I need action movies with a plot and actors that can, well, act and I need them in HD. I don’t need Crank or The Transporter, you should be ashamed.
I was looking for minority report on BluRay or HD-DVD and had no idea it wasn’t available until just now. What a bummer. I can get Rio Bravo on Blu-Ray or Christmas Vacation on HDDVD but not minority Report?
Don’t get me wrong, I like both of those movies but there is no reason for an old grainy western like Rio Bravo to be out on HD before Minority Report and Christmas Vacation has a choice of stereo or mono track on HD. Give me a break Hollywood.
My wife and 2 sons bought me a Blu-Ray player for my birthday. Sweet! I thought I would have to wait until Christmas. I got the new John Mayer concert, “Where The Light Is” and “The Punisher” both on Blu-Ray.
Update: Turned out even at a great price the Magnavox NB500MG9 Blu-Ray player was not up to the task. There were way too many discs from NetFlix that just wouldn’t play on it. We constantly had to use the Playstation to watch Blu-Ray discs from NetFlix. It was very slow but that would have been OK if it just worked.
I recommend the JVC XV-BP1 for features and performance. At current prices there is no reason to buy less. There are better, if you have the budget for it.
They did it, they killed HD-DVD. I didn’t get to open and watch every one of the HDDVD movies I got for Christmas and it’s already obsolete. Toshiba officially announced that they give up. I guess I’ll be getting a Blu-Ray player before the end of the year. It stinks being on the losing team 