Alright, when I got my receiver, I also got a $50 gift card for OneCall.com. I planned to get a blu-ray player there, but so many people really love the Oppo products (even though they are pricey), and OneCall doesn't sell Oppo.

So be creative and help me spend this gift card...

Surge protector?

Hmmm... Probably not a bad idea.

So we have a practical idea. What else? So many people like to spend other people's money...

Oh wait, it just dawned on me that I already have a really nice surge protector that I can use... Other ideas?

Nick, consider the Grado SR-60i here for $79 shipped.

Hmm... I picked up a nice pair of headphones for my birthday in August that also have a microphone jack so that I can use them when gaming. What I travel, I use some nice in-ear headphones...

But good idea.

Do you have a tripod? For mounting an AVR microphone on.

Alas, I do. I have a full size like that one, a smaller one that twists around just about anything to allow for unique mounting, and a monopod...

I've never heard of Onecall but judging from the name, wear protection.

They've been around for a few years. Pretty reputable too.

Yeah, I bought my first (only!) AV receiver from them, as well as my macro lens. No problems at all.

I will spend it for ya.

Nick, I just checked out their site. They are having a Chirstmas sale on, among other things, Panasonic's replacement brushes for their Oral Irrigator #EWDJ10 @ $10 ea. You could buy 5.

I love that product name.

Again, back to my point.

OK. So now that I am seeing the drywall quotes for my basement, I probably should get something besides an Oppo 93 player and try to use my $50 credit at OneCall.com for a blu-ray player from there.

Any suggestions one which player? Looks like they carry 24 different models.

Some are more than the Oppo, so that would be dumb. Others get bad reviews I am sure (like the Onkyo seems to be crap. I checked it out since I just bought an Onkyo receiver)...

Price list as of this posting time:

Nick, I myself wouldn't consider any single-disc player for general music/movie use, but if you just want a player for movies, there wouldn't appear to be a good reason not to just go with the least expensive LG.

Well there is one reason, depending on your sourcing habits and legal/moral obligations. JohnK is in the US where the rules are stricter but in Canada, we still have no definitive laws against copying or sharing "digital" media. However, that is likely to change soon as our gov. has some bills in the works.

That being said.....
If you play to buy a device that can also receive streaming content, then you may want to check out the latest list of devices to avoid that have incorporated Cinavia. That would, of course, be any Sony product (since they invented it) but there are some others as well including several LGs. Wiki keeps s list under the topic "Cinavia".

If you only watch from the original media, then this should not be a concern.

I don't know what Cinavia is (???), but I have a Sony with wireless capability and I don't have any problems streaming stuff. It's the Sony BPD-S580. Reviews said the menus were slow, but in my experience, they were faster than the Panasonic menus. Panasonic had a better interface for entering keyboard data than Sony though, especially when using Pandora. I've gone through 3 Panasonic BRD players in 4 years. This is my first Sony, so I don't know how it's drive mechanism, etc, will last yet. I've had a lot of problems with Panasonics.

Panasonic 30 (oldest) model was the best, but no wireless. Panasonic 60 model was the worst. I had 2 of them, traded one in with a problem, then the 2nd one I got developed that same problem. It would occasionally go back to the units original menu for a second or 2 then start playing the movie where it left off of. Panasonic 210 model was my first wireless. The first thing to go wrong was the ability to wave your hand over the top to open/close door would only work when it wanted to. Then the drive mechanism started to really slow down. Had to keep jabbing the open/close button to get it to work properly.

Cinavia is Sony's newest form of copy protection. If you try to watch a Cinavia protected movie on anything but a legit copy of the media, on a player that has this built in, you will eventually see an error message appear that "you don't own this movie......" and the audio will shut down.

They let you watch just enough of the movie to wet your appetite. I guess they believe that by letting you watch, n minutes, you will be so engrossed that you will have to go out an by a legit copy.

The code it monitors for this is built into the audio tracks and so far it has been handily surviving any attempts by hackers to invent a convenient way around it. Last I read (which was a good while ago), the only way to beat it is to keep changing your devices time clock to be nn minutes into the future but you have to do it every time the error comes up.

All of my copies are legit copies, so, no problem there.

Wouldn't they have to set a date to start encoding the audio track with this copy protection? What about older stuff? We have copies of a number of Disney flicks that we made backups of because the originals were getting scratched pretty badly. But they are at least 3 years old.

I pretty much have 100% legit everything because I like 100% full audio/video capability from a disc. I don't touch much in DVD anymore, and even if I wanted to make a copy of someone else's blu-ray, it would cost me 50%-75% of the cost of the original blu-ray anyway just in the blank dual layer media.

Right now, we only stream stupid stuff like YouTube on our other blu-ray player (Sony). Our Dish programming has Blockbuster Movie Pass, and since that is separate.

So maybe Cinavia isn't a big deal for me, but it is good to know.

Ugh. This stupid blu-ray player thing is annoying.

Every time I ask advice about one of the lower cost players, people tell me to buy something more expensive. Of course, OneCall.com doesn't sell what they recommend. And a ton of people (again, elsewhere) are telling me just to jump to the Oppo 93 since I have a nice projector and will have a 133" screen.

Grrrrr..... I wish I could just sell this $50 card and have the cash to spend elsewhere.

I'll give you $20 for it!

LOL. To sell it here, I would need to put it on the auction site and get Axiom bucks for it.

Nick, I wasn't telling you to buy something more expensive, but my previous comment was based on viewing the discs themselves. The lowest price LG doesn't do any streaming, so if you want that feature you'd have to make a different pick.

Let me rephrase...
Here is what I said:


I should have emphasized it a little different...

Every time I ask advice on another forum about one of the lower cost players, people on that forum tell me to buy something more expensive. Of course, OneCall.com doesn't sell what they recommend. And a ton of people (again, elsewhere) are telling me just to jump to the Oppo 93 since I have a nice projector and will have a 133" screen.

Sorry for making you think that I was going after you John... I wasn't.

Just buy the Oppo 93. Or maybe something more expensive.

I guess it depends on how much you want to spend on the player. If you are not really trying to stay close to your $50 and want ALL the features then I see no reason to get anything else but the Oppo as it offers pretty much everything you could ever want.

If you want to stay close to that $50 limit I would get that Panasonic DMP BD75 for $20 more than the LG, but that is just me; I still don't trust LG electronics as I and my sister have had some bad luck with their DVD players.

I don't need to stay near $50, it just helps to have the $50 to help drop the cost a little.

Nick, I understood that were commenting about other advice; I was just reemphasizing that my advice was to go with a low-priced choice.

Ok then, what do you want this player to do for you, streaming, network capable, SACD playback? I will also add that IMHO, if you are going to get anywhere near the price of an Oppo with these other brands, you might as well buy the Oppo; that $50 savings isn't worth it, so that would leave you in the $150-$350, there are some really good choices in there. Do some checking on reviews and make a choice.

I don't need DVD-Audio or SACD at all. Just looking for a good picture and sound as a first priority. I like being able to look up some things like YouTube videos, but we don't do much more than that. We will stream the occasional video from Blockbuster Movie Pass via our Dish receiver, so that isn't a big deal. So not much streaming needs.

Need an extra memory chip for your camera? It's not sexy, but I can always manage a need for one of those!

You know........ Santa knows if your pictures are naughty or nice.

There now that picking on Mark is done, I'll answer your question Nick.

Your old Disney movies are save. To be effected by Cinavia, the Cinavia code has to be built into the audio track. So just very new movies are effected and just from those companies who have chosen to use it. Wiki has a list of Cinavia embedded movies as well. It's not very long yet but it includes some bigger names.