Panasonic Announces Pricing for DMP-BD50 $699 MSRP

[deacongreg]

Originally Posted by wes

Sorry what does LOL mean

Laughing out Loud.

[rex]

Originally Posted by kennyt

OK, I see the point, but when an SD card of 1G can be had for ~$16, is this a real issue?

Ken, my point wasn't that it is expensive to add memory, but rather that given how inexpensive memory is, it is completely ridiculous that on a player of this price, adequate memory is not built-in, particularly when as the first such player, the BD-live feature is one of the primary selling points.
Sure some users may not care enough about it to bother adding the memory; but having minimum amount required to use the feature built-in would enhance the value of all players without adding anything at all to the cost. A clear design/marketing failure IMHO.

[CharlyD]

As I've been able to glean from a few quick searches, all players supporting BD-J (all players) require system storage for data such as application settings but BD-Live requires another category of memory, local storage, for downloads which can be very large. It would seem that local strorage would require a HDD, a feature that could significantly add to the cost of the player. Could this local storage be on a NAS drive?

[rex]

Originally Posted by CharlyD

As I've been able to glean from a few quick searches, all players supporting BD-J (all players) require system storage for data such as application settings but BD-Live requires another category of memory, local storage, for downloads which can be very large. It would seem that local strorage would require a HDD, a feature that could significantly add to the cost of the player. Could this local storage be on a NAS drive?

BD-live doesn't require that much storage to need a HD. It only needs 1G which can be in the form of onboard memory, or as in this case, an SD memory card. You are correct that all players support BD-J which is a subset of Java's GEM standard. Java is used to run the menus, and other interactive features on Blu-ray discs. (This is a big improvement on the very awkward and primitive method used by regular DVDs.)

[rlpiii]

I know on the LG BH200, when web-enabled content must be downloaded, you can have it download to either the extra internal memory on the player or to the player's USB port.

[rex]

It is entirely possible that extra content may exceed the 1G minimum memory requirement, so the ability to supplement on-board memory with SD storage or USB storage may be very useful. Such extra storage might also be used for locally archiving extra content from multiple discs, though I don't know if this is possible right now.