Vernholio
- Comment
This player advertises that its wi-fi/ethernet compatible. While it is, the software driving the system was obviously rushed to release this player. Every time it attempts to connect to the internet, it has to go through a 3-step process to verify the internet connection, and you have to "OK" it once it completes... Why wasnt this designed to happen in the background? Minor, I know, but it just reeks of Sony rushing and not properly coding software for it. Another con, in my opinion is it will always auto-play when a DVD is in it and you power it up (with no way -- that I can seem to find -- to disable this). If I dont know that my wife has left one of her Yoga DVDs in the thing, and I power it up, theres no way to stop it from auto-playing, except getting up to eject the damn DVD... Sure, I could wait til it reads the DVD and eject it when you get to the main menu, but too many times, DVDs are coded to block use of any controls via the remote until its gone thru all of its initial FBI warning/preview crappola. Yeah, I know I sound lazy, but it sucks if youre all comfortable on the sofa (with the dog in your lap) and you have to get up to manually eject the damn DVD! To the worst part... At least a dozen times since weve bought the thing, its just flat-out locked up on us -- for both DVD playback or trying to stream content. Nothing short of unplugging it (and leaving it unplugged for a minute or so) will reset it. To add insult to injury here, Ive got all of the wiring for our entertainment center meticulously organized, out of sight BEHIND a huge wardrobe-style cabinet. I had to physically move that beast to get to the power strip. In my laziness, Ive even gone as far as to trip the breaker that that outlet is on to avoid moving that damn cabinet (only to realize I then had to reset several digital clocks). Ive since moved the power strip to the floor, and I can now CRAWL to it to unplug the player. OK, Ive ranted enough... The thing is, when it DOES work, its a decent player. 3D is great, and it works relatively well in streaming Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Pandora, etc. It also integrates pretty well (after a bit of troubleshooting) with our networked PCs in the house to access other media. Id just really appreciate a software update thatd eliminate some of the issues were having. Recommend it? Maybe now. if you can find it on Craigslist, or used here for $30. EDIT: 6/25/2015 - Horrible DLNA streaming receiver... I would avoid it, altogether now! Damn thing says it functions as a DLNA streaming device for content on your Windows network. Uh... Its intermittent at best. The list of supported media formats ([...]), says that it is compatible with .mp4 encoded media. "Cool!" I thought. So I went to ripping all of my standard DVDs to mp4 (using "MakeMKV" to decrypt them, and "HandBrake" -- a well-received transcoding product), saving them to my Windows system and streaming them via Windows Media Server. Well, first of all the player recognizes ONE of the seven mp4s I generated (and I decrypted/encoded all 7 the same way). All others are labeled as "corrupt or unsupported". WTF? Especially when the same mp4s play fine directly in Windows. I thought maybe Windows media Server and the Sony didnt jive, so I tried copying all of the mp4s directly to an external USB drive -- which is also SUPPOSEDLY supported. Plugged it in to the player, and the directory structure is there, but each folder says No available content". Not to be defeated (Im pretty stubborn, as I m sure you can tell), I took it a step further and found a great DLNA Server software -- "Mezzmo". I *THOUGHT* it had solved all of my problems... All I had to do was decrypt each DVD to the external drive as .mkv files and Mezzmo would take care of the necessary transcoding, on-the-fly, as I queued up a movie on the Blu-ray player. IT WORKED! Well... sort of. A few of the movies stutter and just completely hang during playback. OK, theyre just bad decrypts, right? NOPE... I figured out how to set up my Roku 3 via Mezzmo to stream videos to a separate TV (using Roku Media Center). EVERY. SINGLE. VIDEO. WORKS. JUST. FINE... This applies to BOTH videos Id already ripped to mp4 (that arent recognized on the Sony), and videos that are transcoded by Mezzmo -- EVEN the ones that stuttered on the Sony! So, I guess Im going to look into another Roku 3 to stream content to our main TV, and (I GUESS) keep the Sony for Blu-Ray disc playback, only... What a waste! Bottom line... HORRIBLE software on this device. Cant believe a name like SONY would put out such a sub-par product!