Set-top Blu-ray or PS3? Sell me. ROUND TWO

So a year ago, I was considering finally grabbing a Blu-ray player and I posted on QT3 about not being sure whether to go PS3 or set-top.

I didn't end up taking the plunge, because I simply couldn't decide which route to go.

I still want a Blu-ray player, my needs are still basically the same. Movies, Pandora, and maybe Netflix or Hulu. I don't have any intention of buying PS3 games. Ease of use is key. I have an HTPC but the wife hates using it because media playback still isn't as easy on a PC as it is on a set top. DVD and Blu-ray playback on a PS3 though is much better than on an HTPC and almost as good as set-top.

Is set top box more than adequate these days, or would I be better off paying the $100+ extra for the PS3 and infrared adapter? Any specific model recommendations? One note - the set-top + Roku option isn't on the table. I'd have to get a new receiver because my current one doesn't have enough inputs.

Help appreciated as always.

I have a quite nice Panasonic player now and I used to have a PS3 before it was stolen (the Panasonic was a cheaper replacement because I really just needed to play Blu-rays and do some video streaming).

The set-top is as good as the PS3 was at playing movies. The PS3 was hands down better at navigating and general responsiveness when it comes to using any streaming service, but once you get to the video you want to watch there's pretty much no difference.

So yeah, a modern networked set-top player does it all for less, but not quite as well for some things. If you're 80% blu-rays and 20% streaming I'd say get the set-top. If you stream more than you watch blu-rays get a PS3.

For Blu-rays themselves, I'm sure anything is fine. For streaming services, though, you'll want a device intended for that purpose, which means Xbox/PS3/Roku. If you want a Blu-ray player and a streaming service in one device, PS3 is the only sane option that exists right now.

To tangentify this, though, I will note that I essentially never use physical discs anymore. Even a year ago, I did regularly watch movies on spinning plastic, but now... basically never. Which is sad, because Blu-ray quality is phenomenal and online stuff is often just fine, but is never as good as Blu-ray; but there you are.

Also, to offpoint recommendations a bit more, I got a uHDMI to HDMI cable the other day, which lets me hook my tablet up to the receiver, and it turns out that Android supports the multiple screen thing pretty well already. If you play a video in either Netflix or the native video player (didn't try other apps), the video streams across HDMI in native resolution, but controls stay on the tablet screen, which you can then use as a great remote (selecting a movie on Netflix on the tablet is way better than through the Xbox/PS3 UI, obviously).

With a long cable dangling across the living room, this isn't necessarily a super-great solution; but once Miracast takes off next year and you can do the same thing wirelessly, it's pretty compelling. So if you want to wait another year and ask this in 2013, you might get a different answer...

I'm all about permanence, hence the HTPC that has been a nice little workhorse for years. I'm just sick the hoops I have to jump through to play DVDs on it.

It really sounds like the PS3 may be worth it in my case.

With the streaming services requirement, the PS3 is the way to go -- the $100 difference is the cost of a Roku-type box anyway. And you're unlikely to find a set-top box with an interface for different services that's as easy to use as the PS3's. (I've never tried any of the recent dedicated blu-ray players, though, since I've been using a PS3 for years).

Only downside I can think of is that the PS3 requires a lengthy system update just about every time I turn it on. If you end up using it more frequently than I do (about once a month these days), then you might not run into the same problem.

I have a (too) expensive blu-ray player from Oppo (BDP-93EU), because living in a third world country I require region free playback to be able to import any blu-ray I want from the US, and this was one of the very few players that could provide that in a trustworthy way. But without the region free requirement there isn't really much reason to get a standalone player anymore; it is also very much like having a laser disc player used to be. As mkozlows says: Spinning discs are on their way out. If you have lots of discs the Oppo is rather nice though, in addition to the basics (CD, DVD, Bluray) it also plays the audio formats nobody wanted: SACD and DVD-Audio. I have a few of both. It does some streaming too, but I have found that I prefer an Apple TV for that.

The Playstation 3 is a really good streaming media-player and it also plays DVDs and Blu-Rays nicely. I would recommend that for anyone requiring both plastic discs and streaming services. It does most of these tasks very well. You can also stream video from a server on your LAN, but I have found that a bit clunky. The one thing I don't really like on the PS3 is the separate remote control; it is not backlit, and does not have a nice layout. I actually went back to using the game controller for media control on the PS3 (before switching to Apple TV + Oppo), so make sure you are comfortable with the remote before buying one of those.

If you don't plan on getting much use out of the PS3, then I'd just go with a set top. I got a $100 Sony one from Costco last year, and it does all the Netflix, Amazon, Hulu or tons of other streaming that I could want, and loads up the blu-rays quickly for when I use Red Box from time to time. Only thing I wish is that it could play back my AVI and MKV files through the network or an attache HDD.

I've got a Panasonic Blu-ray player that does all the Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/etc and it also streams MKVs from my PC. It only cost me around $80 last Christmas. Look around and you can find a cheap set top Blu-ray player that'll do everything you want.

HTPC?

Get a BD drive for your main computer, AnyDVD HD, and Handbrake. Stream the rips or put them on the HTPC's disk. Rips take up about 4GB of space and are of indistiguishable quality when you use Handbrake's suggested settings. Also try out Plex Media Center to keep your collection organized and easy to browse.

Playing the movie off the disc is an inferior experience due to all the loading. It's just so much nicer being able to launch directly into the movie. The tradeoff is that you don't have easy access to featurettes/commentary tracks.

I would do this, but there are a couple big issues.

HTPC usage has proven to be too techie for my wife.
Last time I audited 10-foot UIs, they all had performance issues and were unstable. I don't have time to fuck around with that shit anymore, so that's right out.
I'd rather not kiss 4GB per movie bye-bye because that would mean immediately needing to upgrade the hard drive in my media server.
We like the special features and if I've got to go back to the disc to play those, then it sorta defeats the purpose of the rip.

Here's what I'd like to see an enterprising programmer come up with:

A Blu-ray and DVD rip container format that is basically a single-file and includes all the menus and special content at whatever encoding is chosen. And one that can be done as easily as I rip my CDs to FLAC.

Is that too much to ask for?

The AACS copy-protection stuff means that no big-budget reputable place will ever do that, and no licensed player will work that way. And as far as other things working that way, well, Blu-ray is complicated, with a full-on JVM that can run semi-arbitrary Java code. It's not just reading a media format, it's executing a program.

Stupid DMCA. I'll just stick to discs.

But aren't reputable companies like Anysoft already breaking DMCA with AnyDVD?

So I noticed that all the Black Friday pricing of $199 PS3 bundles are gone. Are those going to have any chance of coming back near X-mas or am I SOL? Again, don't care about the games, I just want the cheapest PS3 I can get.

Kicking myself for passing up the Black Friday $199 bundles now. The same bundle I paid $249 for today was $199 on BF and I am pretty sure there were a few vendors I could've ordered it from online. BAH.

Anybody want to buy the Uncharted 1/2 or inFamous 1/2+FoB?

yes..

oh.. erm.. ahh.. good luck.

haha, no.

yes.

a lot of this is just due to the technical hurdles involved- Blu-Ray being a closed format whose specs are a moving target (to a degree). menus are (from my basic understanding) typically Java programs that do funky stuff. it's one reason why you still don't see free media players (vlc, mp classic) providing complete menu support for actual Blu-Ray discs. i believe there are only a couple (commercially licensed) Blu-Ray Windows-based media players that provide that support, such as PowerDVD (7.x 'Ultra' and newer versions).

most people doing rips of Blu-Ray media tend to have something like AnyDVD HD (to decrypt the media on-the-fly as it is being read) and some tool like MakeMKV or perhaps Clown_BD (+ mkvmerge from MKVToolNix), and they all work out great if you don't want to re-encode the video or audio streams at all. if you do, that's something else entirely, and there are still more tools (both user friendly and otherwise) to do so. i have no idea why i know anything about any of this.

So I finally hooked the damn thing up.

I had just assumed that since hey, there are set-top Blu-ray players that have Pandora built in, that hey, the PS3 would HAVE to have a native app for that, right? RIGHT?

Godfuckingdamnit are you serious it's 2013 people.

Next thing I'm gonna find out that the media server features suck and I basically just paid 3 times what I should've paid for the features that are actually the ones I want or are worth having. Grrrrr.

I got til Jan 25th to return it to Microcenter, so I guess I'll test this thing out. Bah.

Ha ha, you expected Sony to provide useful software!

I thought the whole point of the Playstation Network was to have Apps like... everyone else has.

i think i used pandora off their browser last year. but yeah, it is annoying how you can't have features other stuff have. but you can try their crackle app...

So my Xbox (a two year old "S" model) started making death-rattle fan-grinding sounds yesterday. So I switched over to the PS3 for Netflix.

Hoo boy.

Try #1: Turn on PS3, go to Netflix app. It prompts me to sign in to my PSN account. I do so, and it tells me that I need to update my system firmware. So I exit Netflix and go through that baroque process. (I have had to do this every single time I've turned my PS3 on, which may tell you how rarely I use my PS3.)

Try #2: Turn it on, launch Netflix, it says again that I have to sign in. Okay, I do. And now Netflix gives me an inexplicable error and tells me to exit out of Netflix and sign in. Um, why do you have a sign-in in the app if it doesn't work? So I push the PS button to bring up the XMB, and navigate over to the Sign-In, and sign in again, to no change. Then I realize that, oh, just because the XMB is up doesn't mean Netflix is stopped. So I quit Netflix, go to the sign-in, and A-HA! now before I sign in it forces me to accept some privacy documents via an awkward UI.

Apparently it couldn't do that before signing me in inside of an app, stupidly (or do the Microsoft thing of just doing it at start-up time with no user initiated effort), so I had to exit out and sign in externally to trigger the okay flag.

Try #3: Okay, now I'm signed in for real! Let's try it now! And I get... a weird error. And nothing I can do other than click "Retry" futilely. The Netflix app tells me to look at a web page, which tells me that I need to put my remote control away and grab an actual controller. Then, after launching the Netflix app, I need to hold down Select + Start at the same time. Which I do, and then it says "oh hey, there's an update for this app, you want to apply it?" Well, yes, of course I do. Well, that's certainly an intuitive mechanism for updating apps.

Try #4: After applying the update to the Netflix app, it actually works. The UI is clunky, compared to the Xbox version, but... am I wrong that it's actually sharper? Is it outputting 1080p and the Xbox was maxing out at 720p?

Anyway, it did finally work, but man, Sony's software is as bad as Microsoft's hardware.

I'm actually pretty impressed by the simplicity of using Playstation Media Server to share files to the PS3. Streaming 480p MP4 video looks fantastic, I swear the PS3 has to be doing some upconversion because it looks better than when I was playing the same video back on my HTPC.

The ease of use for selecting files is such that I know I'll be able to get my wife using it, which is a big step up from the HTPC which was always too clunky for her to bother with.

My most mindblowing DLNA thing is running BubbleUPNP on my tablet, and streaming video from that to the 360/PS3. No matter what the source, I agree that using dedicated set-top boxes/consoles is definitely better than an HTPC, though. My XBMC experiment lasted all of like a month, two years ago (and my Media Center PC experiment not even that long).

I did it around 4 years ago, tried both XMBC, Boxee, Windows Media Center, and whatever else the fuck was around at the time. They all sucked in some way or were buggy or lacked feature XYZ. I remember getting really pissed about how many hoops I had to jump through to timeshift HD video and finally buckled down and began renting a DVR and my wife loves me for that.

I hate that set-top boxes are basically superior to a custom computer thanks to all the HDCP/AACS bullshit but that's basically where we are.

Those are really good games, IMO.

Just wanted to recommend also picking up the PS3 remote control. It's Bluetooth enabled which is just awesome sauciness.

I grabbed the Harmony link from Logitech so it integrates with my Harmony nicely. It'll even do poweron/off.

One advantage that Netflix PS3 has over Netflix 360 is that it will output to Dolby Digital 5.1 (if the movie itself has it--not all do). That's the main reason I use the PS3 client. As far as I know, the 360 client still doesn't support 5.1 audio.