blu-ray DMP-BD60 any problems or glitches?

[Knightmessenger]

I received a blu-ray player as a gift for Christmas. I've heard there have been issues with some of the blu-ray players and some of them wouldn't update well even with firmware support. So I just wanted to ask if there were any known problems with the machine I have.

Also, I know you're supposed to hook a blu-ray player up to an HDTV but if I hook it up to a standard 4:3 one, will it still play properly? Even a full frame dvd (or blu-ray) like Casablanca?
And I assume as a Region A, it will play discs with that region AND discs like Life of Brian that are A,B and C coded.

The model number is DMP-BD60.

[jman98]

You can connect a BluRay player to a standard definition TV, but you have to send the video output out as 480i (unless maybe your TV supports 480p - I wouldn't count on that though). You won't get full high definition, but it will be watchable. The image will be downconverted (shrunk essentially) to be something that your TV can display. Your BluRay player should have a video output setting you can change to 480i for your 4:3 TV.

Casablanca is in 4:3. It should display fine on your standard def TV.

Yes, BluRay disc coded for regions A, B and C will play on your player.

I'm sorry, but I can't help you with any known problems about your player. I have no idea.

[MOVIEGEEK]

The only problem I have read about is the player freezing on Blu-ray discs, the latest firmware(v2.2) fixed it:
http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/bd/download/bd60/index.html

As for your tv I say it's time to upgrade to HDTV.

[Knightmessenger]

Okay, looking at Amazon reviews, it appears to be pretty good with the firmware upgrade. To upgrade do you download the fix to a cd-r and then pop the disc in the machine OR just download it to your player directly if you can hook the player up to the internet? How would you hook it up to the internet? What exactly does the youtube feature give you?

Also, an amazon review mentioned the player was not compatible with Divx. What does that mean, I pretty sure it's a video file format but is that very useful today? I seem to recall a lot of videos being encoded in Divx in the early days of youtube when the quality would otherwise be so crappy.

As for my standard tv, guess what my family does have an HDTV (Sony Wega from early '06) and the analog 4:3 Mitsubishi rear projection big screen is better. The HD has a lower contrast ratio, poor black levels and blurriness that smears picture on dvd playback. (Yes I have spent way too much time fidgeting with the wega settings). Movies with dark scenes just look flattened, over saturated and otherwise make the movie look like it was shot on HD video. The 4:3 rear projection renders dark scenes much closer to how a film image looks in the theatre. I have some of the early Bond dvd's from 1999 and on the 4:3, there is noticeable blockiness from the digital compression. On the HD, the blockiness is not visible meaning that this detail (even undesired detail) has been smeared out.
So although pixel count helps, it sure isn't everything.

[MOVIEGEEK]

Okay, looking at Amazon reviews, it appears to be pretty good with the firmware upgrade. To upgrade do you download the fix to a cd-r and then pop the disc in the machine OR just download it to your player directly if you can hook the player up to the internet? How would you hook it up to the internet? What exactly does the youtube feature give you?

There are two ways of updating firmware: CD-R and ethernet.
With CD-R you just burn but you need Active ISO Burner or use the built-in program with XP, with ethernet you have to hookup the player to your router. You can also request an update CD from Panasonic but it can take 8 weeks. As for Youtube it's just like watching them online, if that's something you like doing. It also has Amazon VOD* which has current releases, the prices vary from $2.99 - 4.99. You need an ethernet connection to watch them.
*only available in the US.

Also, an amazon review mentioned the player was not compatible with Divx. What does that mean, I pretty sure it's a video file format but is that very useful today? I seem to recall a lot of videos being encoded in Divx in the early days of youtube when the quality would otherwise be so crappy.

If you don't know what DivX is then don't worry about it, the player supports AVCHD from a camcorder though.

As for my standard tv, guess what my family does have an HDTV (Sony Wega from early '06) and the analog 4:3 Mitsubishi rear projection big screen is better.

If you aren't going to use an HDTV then don't bother buying/renting Blu-ray.

[kosekjm]

Hi there,

I actually own two of these machines. The 1st has been here since May and the second was bought just a week or two ago for a secondary TV.

So far I've had nearly no problems with either player. I had experienced the freeze issue one time. That was back in May shortly after I bought the first player. As MOVIEGEEK said firmware version 2.2 is supposed to fix this issue and it seems that it might have.

For a more in depth forum for this player see here:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1131783

There is nearly 195 pages of posts to wade through, but lots of good information there. Be warned though, you will see people on that forum that make the freeze issue seem like this is the worst piece of hardware ever to be sent to consumers. Like I said, I've had exactly one freeze with this player and that was months ago. If you read through any of the Blu-Ray player forums there, you will see that all players have some issues with them. To me this player has been nearly flawless.

The player is DVD region 1 and Blu-Ray region A only. You can not play other region encoded disks. It also appears to be NTSC only as I cannot play any of my region free PAL DVD's. I have not tried any foreign or multi-region Blu-Ray disks.

Firmware updates are a non-issue if you have it connected to the internet. You can set the player to automatically check for new firmwares at power up. The last two updates that came down, my very non-technical wife did. She turned the player on, saw a message saying there was a new firmware and hit ok. 5 minutes later, she was up and running just fine. Updating through a CD isn't that much more difficult, you just need to watch how you burn out the firmware disk. A few people on the AVSforum page had problems with the CD burner built into Vista (and possibly Win7) as it would not properly create the disk. Being as I have neither Vista nor Win 7, I have no idea. The 1 time I updated with a disk, XP burned the firware file just fine. Put the disk in, booted up and that was that. One other thing with updates, Panasonic seems to be pretty good about getting updates out. They don't quite document what the firmware fixes. You might just see a note listing that Firmware 2.2 enhances Blu-Ray playback, but no other clarfication as to what has been enhanced. My boss has the BD30 (two generations older version of this player) and he says that Panasonic is still posting firmware updates for his player as they are needed, so hopefully they'll keep updating this one after it is no longer sold.

Divx movies are only supported on the BD80 which is the step-up version of this player. To me Divx is a non issue.

Hooking the player to the internet is as easy as pluging in a network cable. If you want to use the Blu-Ray live features, you'll need it connected and you'll need to purchase at least a 1 GB SD card (Like most lower cost players the manufactures are putting this cost on the consumer to save them a few dollars per unit. I think I got mine through amazon for 10 bucks or so). I've not found much Blu-Ray live "must have" content so again not that big of an issue to me. Other things that you can do when connected is connect to youtube and to picassa the photo sharing site. Youtube videos are hit or miss quality. I have a 40 inch screen and some videos look really good and others look like they were shot with a 1st generation cell phone camera. You do also have access to amazon video on demand. I have a couple of looney toon episodes that amazon had for free last year in my on demand account. Whne I added this player to my account, they now show up on the BD60. Quality for those are pretty good. Some blockiness, but overall very watchable. I have not tried a full movie yet, mostly as I haven't found anything that I want to pay to see. I'd just as soon wait for the actual disk to come from netflix and watch it that way. There is also a weather applet, but I'd just as soon hit weather channel then power up the player and start viera cast and browse to the weather.

I have my player hooked up through a D-Link wireless bridge (DAP-1522) it connects to my router (D-Link DIR-655) at N speeds. When sitting idle the connection sits at about 108 Mbps. When actually pulling data I normally connect between the bridge and the router at about 250-260 Mbps. I have not had any drops or lags while watching youtube videos. Again, most of what I've watched have only been the free 5-10 minute things I find on amazon or youtube videos.

I also have a PS3. Load times betweeen this player and the PS3 are very comparable. I've not had long load times with either of the 60s yet. Some people have said Inglorious Basterds seems to hang when loading, but that might be the Blu-Ray live features loading (I guess there is a bunch of stuff it tries to download the first time it loads). Some have commented that that disk might take up to 6-7 minutes to fully load. As I haven't seen the disk myself, I have no idea. Most movies I put in are up and runnign within 30 seconds or so. To me DVD upscaling on the 60 is much better than the upscaling on the PS3. Standard DVDs look phenomenal. Just rewatched the Star Wars films last weekend on this player and the 60 even makes Jar-Jar look good

The player does have a 4:3 setup in the menu. I believe that you can set it for 4:3 letterbox, but I cannot swear to that right now. I think that DVDs will get downsampled if you are not using HDMI, but again not something I'm a 100% sure on (Only have HDMI running on mine)

All in all I'm very happy with my players. I wish that it played my PAL discs, then I could retire the old Phillips DVD player. I also wish that it had netflix streaming (And it might someday). I wouldn't have bought a second player if the 1st hadn't perfomed as well as it has so far.

Hope this helps.

[Knightmessenger]

Okay, I'm still a little unclear on the internet connection deal. To put in a network cable, does this mean the computer has to be near your blu-ray player? Or can you just use one of those little antennas that can receive a wireless internet signal?

When you say you watched the Star Wars films, it sounds like you mean the altered versions of the original trilogy. Just wondering if you've ever looked at the original versions (which are not anamorphic enhanced) upscaled.

[MOVIEGEEK]

You can use a powerline adapter if you don't want to run a cable.

[kosekjm]

You will need some connection from your router to the network port on the back of the 60. Either you'll need to run a physical network cable to the box (If possible) or come up with some other means to connect the panasonic to your router.

I live in an apartment, so running cables from one bedroom out into the living room was just not going to be possible. For a quick firmware update, thats one thing but leaving a network cable laying on the floor the whole time would have me (and the player) put out on the street by the wife (She's a redhead so can't make her angry )

Since I already had an N router, I started looking for a wireless bridge. This would connect my living room to my router wirelessly. Since I had a D-Link router, I went with the D-Link bridge. In theory you should be able to mix and match different vendors routers and briges, but you might be asking for trouble, so I decided to stick with the vendor that I have. Basically with this bridge it has a four port switch built into it. You plug whatever you want into those 4 ports and then the device is connected to your network. The device believes it is physically wired into your network (And since it is wired to the bridge that is true for a few feet at least) and then the bridge connects to the router via its 802.11N connection. In my setup I have the PS3, the BD60 and my TV all hooked into the bridge. All three items connect to my network just fine. In fact in this configuration I actually get better network speeds from my PS3 then I did with its built in wireless.

This is the bridge that I have:

http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=663

There are other bridges available. Some have switches built into them and some are single port adapters. Since I had multiple items that I would want to connect, I wanted to make sure that I had something with more than one port on it.

The BD-60 will not use a USB wireless adapter (If that is what you are asking about). For those to work, your device would need to have drivers already loaded for it. Since the 60 was designed only to have a cable plugged into it, the only driver in its firmware is for that onboard NIC. So a USB wireless NIC, like you might plug into a laptop, would not work on this player. There are wireless adapters out there that are designed to plug into say a printer. These are similar in nature to a bridge. They connect to the device via a regular cat 5 cable. The device then thinks it is physcially connected to a lan, so you need no drivers on your device. For these to work, you would normally physically connect this to your router first, configure it to connect to your router wirelessly and then move it wherever you need it.

Or like MOVIEGEEK said, you could try a powerline adapter setup. These should piggyback your networking through your homes power lines. I have absolutely no experience with these though, so I wouldn't be much help in trying to guide you in their use/setup.

Clear as mud right?

[ttony_at]

I haven't posted here in ages and so I apologize if my post is isn't at the right place.
I bought, brand new, Panasonic Model: DMP-BD60 serial number: VA9FCoo4o76 A June 2009, in around 2010.
Worked beautifully, until today. I came home and put in a DVD movie and it started playing it, but the machine wouldn't respond to its own remote control, except for Pause and Display and a few other things. I put in new batteries and confirmed they are new. And suddenly, every button I press now causes the machine to display "Set 1".
So, following what I thought was a solution I read online, I pressed and held the number 1 button and the OK button for 5 seconds, but the problem remained. So I tried 10 seconds and even longer, but the nachine continues to say, "Set 1". I even tried the reverse. I even took the batteries out and held down bottoms to drain the remote, and tried to reset the machine which caused it to ask me which language to choose from - but I can't choose English because it keeps saying "Set 1".
I'm very frustrated with what's happened. Please help!
- Tony in Canada.