Samsung LN32D450 media player

[purmax]

Hello, could someone provide input about the difference between a samsung's built-in media player capabilities in terms of video/audio/subtitle/external hard drive compatibility and a portable media player adapter such as the WD's TV live, Micca's Mplay-HD, etc? I realize the Samsung's format support is smaller, but is it limited enough to hinder my experience with downloaded movies substantially?

Here's the LN32D450 manual on their supported formats (page 133)
http://downloadcenter.samsung.com/content/UM/201103/20110322130758063/LX5ATSCA_ENG_US.pdf

[edDV]

The main differences are limited codec/container support, limited user playback tools and unlikely to ever be updated in the future except for major bugs. The separate media players get enhancement updates.

[jman98]

Samsung's policy in the past has been to not make firmware updates available to consumers because the chance of bricking your TV is too high. That's a business decision and I understand their reasoning. If you restrict firmware so that just technicians can easily get to it, you put updating in the hands of people who do know what they are doing. That doesn't mean you can't find firmware updates on your own as a consumer, but it will not be easy. Consequently that means that the reality is that your player will probably never be upgraded beyond what it supports right now.

Is Samsung's format support limited enough to be a problem for you? Maybe. Depends on what you get and where you get it. We do get a lot of complaints here from people who own Samsung TVs who complain about not being able to play their downloads. The audio is usually particularly restrictive. Just be prepared that you may have to do a lot of conversions of downloaded files to get them to play on the TV.

[nicksson]

I think it's very important what sort of TV has you get. Maybe yours can play only few formats, while another can much more. For example, my Samsung D 6500 series LED TV has no problems at all playing almost all (99% of) my downloaded or encoded video files. If the files are correct encoded and/or muxed with a compliant, good software, in a widely used format like avi, mkv, mp4, the incorporated media player will do his job. So, "Depends on what you get..."

[purmax]

So would you guys recommend buying a separate media player for the sake of practicality and functionality? If so which one would you recommend? I don't care for fancy features, just looking for playback reliability. Thank you.