We received this Blu-ray player along with a few Blu-Ray DVDs for an anniversary present. The BDP-S301 is the same as the BDP-S300 except it is only sold at wholesale outlets like Costco and Sam’s Club. The S301 also includes an HDMI cable.

The Pros: The image looks great. Hands down it is a clean, crisp image, and with the latest firmware updates (click here) supports most audio configurations.

The Cons: This thing is the slowest media player I have ever laid my hands on.

The instructions warn that the initial setup could take 90 seconds to start and after that, start up would be quicker. I suppose they didn’t lie – start up on an everyday basis takes around 40 seconds or more! After that, you can finally eject the tray to insert your movie, or make your way to the menu.

Forty seconds, when you have an impatient toddler wanting to watch Finding Nemo for the 50th time, is similar to taking a short detour through Dante’s 3rd circle of hell.

In addition to that, woe to the consumer who might get a relatively new, $30 Blu-ray movie to play in it. We put in Dan In Real Life (Ok movie, but slow paced) – it proceeds to play the previews, fine. Then it seemingly locks up for a few minutes on a screen with a progress bar that says “loading”. We power down, start the process again. Briefly before the “loading” screen pops up again, it mentions that on older players it could take several minutes to load the menu. Seriously, 3 to 4 minutes later, the menu loads up.

Again, we received 10,000BC (don’t waste your time) in the mail from Blockbuster. Started to play it and we wanted to stop and start it over. I pressed the stop button, and I guess I overloaded the system as it was totally frozen. I had to press the power button for 10 seconds and start the whole process over.

Are you kidding me? This is the worst consumer experience I’ve had in a long time. Maybe I am just an impatient American, but spending 5 minutes waiting for a movie to load up, after having spent that much money on top of the line technology, is a disgrace. Sony should be ashamed that they let this product go to market.

What is it doing during this loading time? Is the Java OS loading all of its unnecessary libraries? Who allowed this to pass by QA?

So my recommendation to anyone looking to buy one of these systems is keep looking! There are more and more choices out there. The PS3 is only $50-$100 more and it loads movies much faster and has many more advanced media features (like streaming audio and video right to the PS3 from other media servers), not to mention all the games you can play on it.

Sony used to be top notch in my opinion when it came to hardware of any kind. However after this incident, I will really have to think twice before getting another Sony product!

Names like Comcast, Verizon, SBC, RoadRunner, Cox, Charter – control the vast majority of the ‘last mile’ internet running into many homes. A fact of today’s economy in the United States is that in any particular geographic area, you only have a handful of providers that can provide high-speed access to the internet. For example, in the Philadelphia region there are only 2 serious options – Verizon and Comcast.

The reason for this is that being able to provide a high speed access line to a home involves running a LOT of wire or fiber – and this has an enormous  investment in capital and technology. Only large companies have the resources available to provide these services and keep them stable. They also will buy many smaller companies that pop up – both for their technology or because it also eliminates some of the competition. Comcast has done this in our area and has largely bought many alternatives to their cable service.

Television, on the same hand, has traditionally been controlled by a handful of local companies. Largely due to copyright restrictions and content agreements, smaller non-geographically centered companies have been unable to gain access to popular content. Therefore most television providers are behemoths and there are not many smaller options.

Now in theory, we now have the internet bandwidth to have full streaming, HD television content to come right over your internet connection. There is a great deal of bandwidth involved in such a service – so the technology many companies use to bring video streams to your desktop (or other display) uses Point to Point protocol (P2P). This distributes the bandwidth across many clients so instead of having one source for the video bandwidth, it is more evenly distributed.

The Problem

Perhaps you see where this is going. Many major ISPs now offer television services over their connections. Likewise, many Television companies offer internet service as well. The prospect of a customer going to another company and purchasing a television package, using your ISP/Television Company’s internet bandwidth (that you already pay for), is a frightening prospect for them. Right now, cable programming is a cash cow. I would say the majority of television users watch a handful of channels on a regular basis, however all cable television companies force you to purchase a ‘package’ with hundreds of channels. They have largely resisted a-la-cart programming options.

What it comes down to is choice. The choice to be a smart consumer and not be tied down to a single company for any service – whether that be internet, television or phone. Of course, the companies who provide these services would love for you to have to use their other services, and in my experience many consumers do go for these ‘triple play’ packages. In their minds, getting phone, internet, and TV for $99 (Even though this is a teaser rate, and will likely go up to $140 a month or more after the initial period) is a great deal.

So what can you do?

So how can the consumer fight for this choice? The companies certainly are not going to fight for you.

1. In the United States, the FCC has some power to regular the big companies that deliver internet to your household. Some people (including myself) do not completely trust in this entity to serve the best interests of consumers.
2. Ultimately, in today’s free enterprise economic system – your wallet does the talking. If your ISP decides to throttle, delay, or otherwise impede P2P traffic – run for the hills and choose the nearest alternative. Let them know this is the reason you are leaving.
3. Finally, educate anyone willing to listen about this problem. It goes largely unnoticed by the general population, and the more people who know about this issue, the better.

So what happens when there are no other choices? Well then it may be time for a new breed of ISP to enter the landscape, but I’ll save that article for another day.

For more information or to contact your representative, see http://www.savetheinternet.com/.

I started writing for MakeUseOf, which is a blog for web application and other free, useful programs! I just posted an article on Ditching your cable company with free, legal alternatives.

Summary:

Ditching your cable company has never been more viable than it is today. The rise of online, streaming TV shows allows you to save on one of the most expensive household bills if you are willing to sacrifice a bit of the convenience of having either a cable box or DVR. The main question you will need to ask yourself is what shows you actually enjoy watching. Several name brand shows are now available online in free, ad supported formats; if your particular shows are not available then you may be stuck with your cable company, at least for now. More and more shows are always coming online, so keep checking back to see if your favorite show is available.

Click here to see full post!

This neat – one of my favorite products, BeyondTV, records television (standard or HD) but it is only a Windows program. You can use BeyondTV Link to play video on any other PC on the local network (because of bandwidth constraints – if you want to view over the internet, use the BeyondTV Web Interface or Orb)

Your TV, both live and recorder, could also be done using Orb; however Orb lacks the nice interface BeyondTV Link has.

I’ve been contemplating moving to MaxOS X for my next Laptop purchase; this plus VMWare Fusion really makes it easy to switch over to a Mac for us Windows users.

Windows Mobile 5 did not seem to have an easy way to have YouTube mobile videos (3gp files streaming over rtsp protocol) play to your phone.

However with Windows Mobile 6 Professional and HTC’s “StreamingPlayer” software – playing YouTube Mobile videos, at least through PIE (Pocket Internet Explorer) is easy.

If you don’t have HTC’s StreamingPlayer – check here. After installing the software, you may also need to modify your registry in order to allow rtsp streams to be opened by the player. Here is a link to the registry entries you need to make – again courtesy of XDA-Developer’s forum.

Save the above text to a .reg file, and import to your device (for example, using RegEdit for WM6)

Hopefully if all went well – when you visit http://m.youtube.com, and click play video, the HTC player will launch and play the video. After the video is done the player will automatically close and bring you back to the browser.

Note that for the above to work, you need to either have wifi access or an unlimited data plan for your wireless account – because streaming video WILL take up a lot of data!

Update 8/8/2007:

Screenshots!

Main Youtube Mobile Screen on WM6

Video Page on WM6

Video Playing

In Landscape mode – you can see the quality of the video is not that great even over WiFi

For another great article on getting this working, check here.