What to look for in a Blu-ray Player

Blu-ray players have taken over from DVD players and if you are a home cinema enthusiast they are a must have item. Blu-ray brings higher quality video and audio to HDTV owners. If you don’t have an HDTV then it is best to stick to an ordinary DVD player.

The Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) set certain standards when Blu-ray first appeared on the market. However, because the manufacturers were keen to launch Blu-ray players, they were allowed to implement certain features over a period of time. The early Blu-ray players were Profile 1.0 players. This required support of the Java programming language that makes interactive features possible as mandatory, but there was no requirement for onboard memory so many Profile 1.0 players would struggle to do much more than play a movie. Manufacturers are no longer allowed to bring Profile 1.0 to market. Profile 1.1 or Bonus View players followed. These included at least 256MB of memory and adds secondary audio and video decoders to allow for such features as picture-in-picture. All players since October 2007 must meet these standards as a minimum. Profile 2.0 or BD-Live adds an internet connection and 1GB of storage. These features give a Blu-ray Player the ability to download additional content such as trailers and other bonus features. They also enable online shopping and gaming. The extra memory helps to improve player responsiveness. Although this is not yet mandatory, many Blu-ray players already have this capability. Some players are just BD-Live ready and that means that the storage is not built in and you would have to provide storage by adding memory via a USB drive or memory card.

Something to look out for when you are looking for your Blu-ray player is that the audio is in HD as well. Most players can pass high resolution audio via bitstream over HDMI to audiovisual receivers, but only the latest receivers have the required decoders and HDMI outputs. Players with there own decoders can pass high-resolution audio to any audiovisual receiver that can accept and process audio via HDMI.

Blu-ray players can also play standard definition discs but not all of them play them well. If you have a large collection of discs it is something to look out for.

Most Blu-ray Player can accept firmware updates, a capability that allows manufacturers to fix performance issues or to add new features to the players after you have bought them. It is easiest to do this if your player is wireless or has an Ethernet connection. BD-Live players will need an internet connection and many players have wireless connections. Some of the budget players may still need a hardwire connection.