USB capabilities in Standalone BD Players

[Bobby Henderson]

Certain standalone Blu-ray disc player models have a single USB port for attaching flash-based external thumb drives. The capability is meant for providing reserve memory for downloading BD Bonus View and BD Live features. Some BD players have USB ports only for firmware upgrades. Naturally, USB can provide a lot more than just that.

Which standalone Blu-ray disc players have USB ports that can see and play audio/video/image material from external hard disc drives?

I own a 80GB PS3 (the older version with 4 USB ports, SACD compatibility and a variety of flash card slots). One thing I really like about the PS3 is being able to attach an external hard drive loaded with hundreds of music CDs, videos, photos, etc. I have a 1 terabyte WD MyBook hard disc attached to it now. It's pretty nice to be able to shuffle through hundreds of artist and album folders and play music a LOT faster than I could from shuffling CDs. And the music is full LPCM CD quality, not compressed MP3/AAC stuff. No sweat with 1 TB of hard disc space.

I'm trying to find some standalone BD players to recommend to certain personal friends who just can't see themselves buying a gaming console (read: toy -the way they see it). They like what I'm able to do in using an external hard disc as a massive juke box with the PS3. But they would like to get that sort of capability in a more traditional movie disc player.

The upcoming Samsung BDP4600 has built in WiFi and also features two USB 2.0 ports. However, it is unclear whether those ports will allow media playback from attached external hard discs. The unit will allow multimedia streaming from "media center" PCs.

What standalone BD players, if any, allow external hard discs to be attached for playing audio/video/image material?