Pioneer Elite BDP-HD1 Home Media Gallery

[timztunz]

Is anyone that has this player having issues with the Home Media Gallery? I can access music but it claims that there are no movies or pictures on the media server. I have an Elite PRO1140HD which also has Home Media Gallery and it had no problems finding all three formats (music, pictures and movies).

[timztunz]

I now have the TV, the BDP-HD1 and a ROKU M2000 all connected to the network. The TV Home Media Gallery finds and reports all movies, pictures and music on the media server. The ROKU does and has always, worked flawlessly (but only for music). The BDP-HD1 says there are no movies or pictures on the media server and I've now figured out that while it does show music, it doesn't show it all. For instance, it will say that an album has 6 songs where the TV will show that it has all 12 songs. However, navigation functionalitity in both the TV and the BDP-HD1 for music in Home Media Gallery leaves a LOT to be desired. It's VERY slow and cumbersome. Everyone should just take a page out of ROKU's playbook on this subject, intuitive and FAST. It's really nice though, to be able to see the album art and track info on the screen which you can not do with ROKU. But not at the cost of the painfull navigation process. Any help that anyone can offer will be greatly appreciated.

[timztunz]

Apparently I'm the only person on the planet having problems with Home Media Gallery?

[mparks29]

I just got dsl installes yesterday. Im not really computer literate. But I have the verizen modem connected to the wirless belkin n1 router on my tv stand . Then I ran 2 ethernet cables. 1 to ps3 and 1 to the pioneer player. I also have a laptop and my daughters pc running wireless. I downloaded windows media 11. Then I signed up for the 14 day free trial with urge. I started downloading a whole bunch of songs but I noticed the media gallery would shut off. I m guessing because I was downloading to many songs. Anyway late last night when everything finished I didn't have that problem..I just had a problem with it being so slow. I m very new to this stuff but overall I excited about doing this. I was trying to convince my wife that this was money well spent. I was also able to view photos with no problem. It was only slow with music. Next weekend I try to strem some HD movies. By the way I read some where that this would make your photos in hd. But they don't look hd and they don't fill up the screen. I have a 5 mp fuji. 1 Question ? Do you have problems getting your media gallery to come on? Sometimes when I turn the player on the HMG is not highlighted. Then on WMP11 I click on refresh devices and it works.

[timztunz]

I finally returned the first player and the new player works fine, eventually. After I turn it on (or restart Windows Medial Player 11) nothing shows up as being available on the media server for quite some time. Yesterday I noticed that at 13 minutes after starting the unit nothing had yet shown up. I went back and looked at 18 minutes and all the movies, pictures and music was there. I guess it must be buffering the libraries but if that's the case it makes no sense how painfully slow the navigation process is. Anyway, it works and will be a great way to view pictures and movies from the computer. But for music, nothing yet beats ROKU for speed and ease of use.

[mparks29]

What is roku

[timztunz]

Originally Posted by mparks29

What is roku

www.rokulabs.com

I've been using these products for over 3 years and IMO they are the most stable, fast and intuitive way to play music from your home network on any audio system in your house. They don't do pictures or movies and you don't get the nice display of album covers on a TV but they do music better than anyone.

[phillipm]

I got the player abount 2 weeks ago - the picture is super - using HDMI - now the old format is almost unwatchable. I want to thank the movie reviewers for their suggestions.

I am using the 6 analog cables for audio - it's a little better than the sound on regular DVD-s with toslink or coax. We were promised uncompressed and lossless sound with the True-HD - not there yet.

The Home Media feature only works because I read this web site - Pioneer support was no help. The first rep did not know how to help and promised to call back - he didn't. Called again - this rep blew me off. Now it "works" - but is unstable.

However, we use a 7.1 megapixel camera and the picture quality is much better than old way of making a cd or dvd on the computer and using a sneaker net.

so -
Video is as expected
Audio is less than I was hoping
Home Media needs a lot of work to be useful and reliable
Pioneer technical support is a not acceptable

[keller888]

Finally, after a month I have found some Internet discussions on using the Home Media Gallery. I have the Pioneer 1140HD Plasma, and can't get the damn thing working. I have tried connecting to my PC via my router (which I was told by Pioneer Cust. Serv would not work) and by direct connect via a crossed-over network cable. When I used the crossed-over method, I actually got my PC to see the Plasma (verified by using the PING command to the Plasma's IP address) but when I load the HMG, it does not show any PC connection, nor does it list any servers connected. ANYONE have any suggestions, please comment. It was really a selling feature of this $5000 plasma for me because I have about 50 movies, 5gb of music and tons of home videos I would like to be able to access. Thanks in advance!!

Bill

[aftermarket]

Originally Posted by phillipm

However, we use a 7.1 megapixel camera and the picture quality is much better than old way of making a cd or dvd on the computer and using a sneaker net.

haha! Sneaker net. I love when people use that term.

[timztunz]

keller888 - Believe me, I sympathize with your frustration. I have the same TV and I have the BDP-HD1 BluRay player which also has HMG. I never really had any problem getting the TV's HMG to work (sort of, explained later) so I'm not sure what to tell you about that. But I have seen on other forums, some discussion about firewalls and people having problems until they worked around that issue. However, I did have a problem with HMG on the BluRay player which turned out to be a problem with the player. Once I exchanged it, HMG worked, after a fashion. Which brings me to my point about HMG in general with either the TV's or the BDP-HD1. They are not ready for primetime. Don't get me wrong, I'm a HUGE Pioneer fan. I have two plasma TV's and their BluRay player. They make incredible equipment and I wouldn't consider buying anything else. But for this feature they missed the mark. The menu's are slow, navigation is anything but intuitive and with too many files it doesn't seem to work at all, which might be your problem. I've seen it stated on other forums that to get HMG to "see" their files they had to take their music library down to around 200 songs. That's ridiculous for a music server. I have over 50,000 songs. Some people who are a big fan of the player are willing to dismiss this inadequacy as, "this feature just wasn't designed to handle large libraries." Baloney. If they're going to handle libraries at all, they need to handle them in all sizes. I wish they would just admit that this didn't work as they had hoped and that they're working on a fix. But I'm not holding my breath. If you want a GREAT piece of equipment for streaming music look at ROKU. But I'm waiting anxiously for Apple TV to make it's debut which may put an end to all this discussion. Good luck.

[Psiweaver]

This is their first foray into that market and I think like everything else Pioneer has brought to market we'll see a marked improvement of the feature as they get more feedback from the field and from consumers. They have had some photo viewing campatability for the last 3 or 4 model cycles but that has been limited by resolution of the photos. I don't think that will change as its not designed to play everything. I do think that they will make sure that all .mp3's will work but I wouldn't expect them to make everything like ogg, aac, wav et al work as there are just too many audio formats and they have to pay royalities to use the decoder in their set. The final thing is as far as movies go its a similar situation. I think what would be helpful though is putting out very clear standards as far as what files it will play as well as for the home theater industry in general choosing a standard and adopting it.

[keller888]

Well, thanks to everyone, at least know I can make an informed decision. Looks like I'll move to Plan B, which is to build a new computer running Vista as a Media Center PC. Plan B always costs more $$$, but when your dedicated to your hobby (addicted rather), you find ways to sqeeze money out of nowhere! ;-)
Thanks again and I like this forum, glad I found it

Bill

[zuulboy]

To you Pioneer BDP-HD1 owners: do any of you have Home Media Gallery working when connected to a PC running Windows Vista? My HMG worked fine enough on my old PC with Windows XP, but I cannot get it to work with my new PC running Vista. I have the latest firmware update (3.75) and have checked all the "media sharing" settings on Windows Media Player 11. The Blu-ray player has a green check, all folders are indicated, and the computer shows a connection in "network devices." Everything looks clear, but HMG on my Pioneer is always grayed out and unavailable.

I'd love to hear any tips from someone in the same situation. I suspect it's probably a firewall setting, but I don't know how to remedy that. I get no warning messages about a device trying to connect that shouldn't. I even tried turning off the firewall temporarily just to see if it would connect, but nada. Pioneer has been zero help.

[timztunz]

IMHO HMG is just not ready for prime time. If you only have a few, and I mean very few, pictures or music files, it's tolerable. But for anyone with a serious music collection or decent number of photos the response time is just unbelievably slow, not tolerable. There are many, many other solutions out there for doing these things. They are absolutely the best TV and BD players on the market, again IMHO. But I think with HMG they bit off too big a piece.

[phillipm]

I have gotten several message "can't play disk" on the Pioneer - seems to happen with v 3.65 and v 3.70 when the player is turned on and the home network is inactive (computer is turned off). I pulled the ethernet cable from the hd1, power off and on, and it plays the disk.

Interestingly, the Directv dvr (HD-20) had a very similar bug several releases ago - their machine wouldn't boot up with an inactive ethernet attached.

I am using one cat 6 cable from the Verizon FIOS modem to the home theater rack. Then I use a four port hub to the HD-1 and the directv dvr with short cat 6 cables to the boxes.

Don't the vendors test in the real world where people do not leave their computers on all the time?

Finally - I agree with comments above that Pioneer tech support is almost useless.