Bluray player that supports modern codecs

[LordFlashheart1066]

I currently have an LG BP125. I'm very happy with it, it's lasted me almost 10 years now w/o hardware failure, but it hasn't kept up with the times.

Dolby/DTS is great, but there's no FLAC support, no seeking in .mkv's with compressed headers, no x265, no Hi10P, and most annoying: won't recognize 3+TB drives

Things I don't need: 4K, wifi/internet

Things I'd appreaciate but not holding out hope : playback of VIDEO_TS folders or .iso's from hard drives

Anything out there that checks all these boxes? Compressed headers are an easy enough fix (just gotta run the file thru mkvmerge) but the rest is getting to be a real pain

[october262]

I currently have an LG BP125. I'm very happy with it, it's lasted me almost 10 years now w/o hardware failure, but it hasn't kept up with the times.

Dolby/DTS is great, but there's no FLAC support, no seeking in .mkv's with compressed headers, no x265, no Hi10P, and most annoying: won't recognize 3+TB drives

Things I don't need: 4K, wifi/internet

Things I'd appreaciate but not holding out hope : playback of VIDEO_TS folders or .iso's from hard drives

Anything out there that checks all these boxes? Compressed headers are an easy enough fix (just gotta run the file thru mkvmerge) but the rest is getting to be a real pain

something like this ?? - https://www.220-electronics.com/sony-bdp-s1700-region-free-blu-ray-dvd-player.html

[Cornucopia]

Why are expecting those kinds of things in a Blu-ray player? You would have a much easier time finding those features in a general media player, and of course, an HTPC.

BD players are always designed to primarily play BD, DVD disc media, and only secondarily file-based media.


Scott

[johns0]

If you want a player that does all those things then go for an xbox one s or higher cause they can play almost any file a computer can play

[Ennio]

What is Hi10P?

[Wmonte75]

What is Hi10P?

A simple Google search will help

Edit:

Removed link I'll just post the result here:

Hi10P (also called "10-bit") is a profile of the h. 264 video codec. It has recently become popular in the anime scene for video encodes. The first stable version with Hi10P support is v12 (Frodo).

Hope this helps.

[usually_quiet]

I currently have an LG BP125. I'm very happy with it, it's lasted me almost 10 years now w/o hardware failure, but it hasn't kept up with the times.

Dolby/DTS is great, but there's no FLAC support, no seeking in .mkv's with compressed headers, no x265, no Hi10P, and most annoying: won't recognize 3+TB drives

Things I don't need: 4K, wifi/internet

Things I'd appreaciate but not holding out hope : playback of VIDEO_TS folders or .iso's from hard drives

Anything out there that checks all these boxes? Compressed headers are an easy enough fix (just gotta run the file thru mkvmerge) but the rest is getting to be a real pain

Most UHD Blu-ray players have the ability to play some types of H.265 video files but regular Blu-ray players don't have that ability (HEVC licensing would add to the manufacturing costs). They won't play ISOs or a DVD file and folder structure either.

A rather expensive media player (such as an NVidia Shield TV Pro with Kodi installed or a Dune HD ) can play more of the things that you want to play although they won't play physical discs. An Xbox One S or an HTPC with a Blu-ray drive can play almost anything, including physical discs. FLAC audio shouldn't be a problem but there are some other types of audio that can only be decoded by a TV or high-end audio receiver.

[jagabo]

The industry skipped past 10 bit h.264 (AVC) and went to 8 and 10 bit h.265 (HEVC). Hardly any of the hardware decoders implement 10 bit h.264 decoding (or encoding). All the modern hardware supports 8 and 10 bit HEVC. So you'll need a software decoder for 10 bit h.264. Especially when combined with other advanced options like 16 reference frames and b-frames. Which pretty much means you'll need a computer.

My Chromecast with Google TV (US$50) can play 720p Hi10P with 16 reference frames pretty smoothly (a little jerk here and there). But it's very jerky playing Hi10P with 16 reference frames at 1080p. I have an ultra cheap ONN Android TV media player (US$20) that works about as well. I believe the Nvidia Shield devices have more powerful CPUs so they might be able to deal with Hi10P.

You can find some samples for testing here: https://www.koi-sama.net/files/hi10/

[LordFlashheart1066]

Hi10P is a sort of HDR for AVC (H.264). My LG BP125 can actually play it back but with color artifacts. It's kind of similar to when you have a dropped keyframe, but not as garbled. I'm not sure if the Bluray player is reading the file incorrectly or if it's sending the (non-4K) TV some kind of 10-bit feed it can't parse. Either way, I thought this would be supported by now since both TV and BP are now almost 10 years old. I see some players today support all kinds of nice things like FLAC and even Ogg.

Bluray playback is a must, I burn all my things on BD-R data discs, it'd cost a lot to migrate it all to hard drives. I could buy a HTPC w/ an external Bluray drive, but those drives cost almost as much as a cheap Bluray player. I know I lucked out buying my Bluray player when I did but I still don't want to spend $250+ for only half of an upgrade.

Re: Xbox / HTPC - I considered buying a PS3 as a strictly BD-ROM player back when I bought this but PS3 turned out to have poor support for everything else, so I'm wary of spending that kind of money on a gaming console unless I'm totally sure it does everything listed.

Back then I had a laptop with Vista as a HTPC and it was bad - fan noise and lots of dropped frames/artifacts. Didn't help that I was trying to play back High@L4.1 over iffy wi-fi, but a lot of that was the fact that a several years old $700 laptop still wasn't up to the task.

[Luke M]

The industry skipped past 10 bit h.264 (AVC) and went to 8 and 10 bit h.265 (HEVC). Hardly any of the hardware decoders implement 10 bit h.264 decoding (or encoding). All the modern hardware supports 8 and 10 bit HEVC. So you'll need a software decoder for 10 bit h.264. Especially when combined with other advanced options like 16 reference frames and b-frames. Which pretty much means you'll need a computer.

My Chromecast with Google TV (US$50) can play 720p Hi10P with 16 reference frames pretty smoothly (a little jerk here and there). But it's very jerky playing Hi10P with 16 reference frames at 1080p. I have an ultra cheap ONN Android TV media player (US$20) that works about as well. I believe the Nvidia Shield devices have more powerful CPUs so they might be able to deal with Hi10P.

You can find some samples for testing here: https://www.koi-sama.net/files/hi10/

Amazon Fire TV 4K stick can play High 10 with hardware acceleration, but *only* 1920x1080. All other resolutions fail. (To use this you need a modified version of Kodi that ignores the reported [lack of] capability).

Apple TV has a fast CPU so it can software decode anything (High 10, VC-1, etc).

[LordFlashheart1066]

I think I've ruled out Bluray players :/ It seems you can't get HEVC without an UHD player and they start at €130+ here. I was also warned I would have problems because it will have to downscale for my 1080p TV, and GPT is probably not supported, which is deffo a dealbreaker. (Some Sony players support GPT but only up to 4TB, this doesn't work for me.) Will have to keep the old Bluray player too, since external USB drives to read BD discs also cost €100+

So it seems I should retitle the thread to NAS or Android set-top boxes/sticks where I can run Kodi/VLC