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?

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm surprised this topic hasn't gained any responses. Audio-video-image playback from a variety of USB-attached media, including external hard discs, to me at least seems like a big deal for standalone Blu-ray disc players to close the performance gap with Playstation 3.

One area where PS3 could improve: allowing users to build music play lists based on attached devices. Unfortunately you have to copy the music to the PS3 hard disc for a programmed play list to access it.

[bhampton]

Hi,

I don't know about non-PS3 blu ray players capabilities with USB but you mentioned having tons of PCM music files and so I wanted to ask you something about that. I put a 500 GB drive in my PS3 and wanted to have PCM files from my CD's but PCM doesn't support meta-data beyond just song title. I think you can add meta-data once the stuff in imported on the PS3 hard drive but then you have to add all that stuff to each song. What did you do about that if you remember?

-Brian

[Bobby Henderson]

I haven't done anything about it. The lack of thumbnails and other stuff doesn't really bother me. It works well enough to have the songs organized into Artist/Album sub-folders. With an external hard disc attached you sometimes have to click the "Options" (triangle) button and select "show all information" to access the sub-folders and music tracks.

If the PS3 supported FLAC lossless or Apple lossless then it would be a fairly simple and automatic process for appending meta data. Linear PCM audio tracks (saved as WAV files) won't support it -at least not embedded in the files themselves. I'm not willing to degrade the audio files down to lossy AAC or MP3 just to have some fancy thumbnail art.

[bhampton]

I'm hoping some type of popular lossless alternative to PCM is a option soon too.

It could happen... PS3 gets lots of new capabilities via FirmWare so it's possible.

I bet a lot of people asked for it.