Panasonic DMP-BDT210 refurbish

[tarzan54]

I'm looking at buying the Panasonic DMP-BDT210 since it has such great reviews an also it doesn't have cinavia protection, My question is since it is refurbished by the manufacture would they have upgraded the machine and put cinavia protection on it.

[jman98]

Refurbs typically have the latest and greatest firmware installed on them. I have no idea if the current firmware for that model supports Cinavia or not.

I also wouldn't make my buying decision on Cinavia. Even if this player doesn't support it, eventually it will die. Whether it dies in 1 year or 5 or longer is rather random and depends on a variety of factors. I'm not sure that buying old players for the rest of your life and hoping that they work is a good course of action to take. If nobody ever cracks Cinavia then sooner or later you're just going to have to deal with it. Finally, keep in mind that media players like Western Digital, Popcorn Hour, etc. are not BDA certified. There's nothing to stop you from ripping a BluRay, converting it to a format (ie. MKV) the media player understands, and playing it to your heart's content on a player that can't be made to support Cinavia.

[tarzan54]

Thanks jman98, I never looked into media players so I don't understand them, Do you recommend one over the other? And do they play a Blu-Ray movie as good as the original when converted into a MKV?

[jman98]

I've been happy with Western Digital. They have a few different models to suit different needs.

I did forget one important thing - I'm not sure about the current lineup, but the older Western Digital players do not support DTS-HD or Dolby Lossless. There may be some chance that if you have a receiver that can decode them that they can simply bitstream over to the receiver or they can downconvert in real time to DTS or AC3.

It is possible to simply convert the ripped BD movie to MKV with no re-encoding. And if you choose to re-encode and do so well enough, you may not notice any difference.

[tarzan54]

Thanks, I will look into the Western Digital and hopefully it has an output to plug into my home theatre system, I don't think I will do any re-encoding unless I have too.