Blue Movies

And I don’t mean the kind of movies those of you who are my age or older are thinking of, I’m talking about them blue ray movies. Last night as the MMC Christmas party was winding down our host brought out his copy of Bullit in blu-ray so we could watch the famous chase scene. As one person put it, “They had to round up an awful lot of vintage cars to film this.” The picture was so bright and crisp you could have sworn it was filmed earlier that day.

Donna and I were so impressed with the picture that we thought maybe we would get one of those new fangled blue movie players for ourselves. You can get them at Walmart for a less than a hundred bucks. Then I started thinking, if we are buying one, why not get one that includes Netflix so I can stop dragging out the laptop to to do the Instant Watch thing. Here is a Panasonic for about $130 at Amazon. It says wireless ready, so you have to spend an additional $80 on an adapter. Nah. A little further digging reveals a Panasonic with the wifi adapter included for $170. Alright, but now I have to do a little research because it mentions it is Wireless N, I’m still chugging along with G and I need to know if they are compatible. Turns out it is. In that research I also find that the player will also allow me access to several internet applications like Twitter, Skype, Picasa and Pandora that are worthless to me. Thanks anyway. What about getting all those torrented TV shows to my TV? Not possible the Panasonic Viera Cast. This morning’s paper had a Target flyer shows a wireless ready Samsung for $110. You of course need a $80 adapter for this one too, but Amazon has the player for the same price as Target and the adapter on sale for $60 making the combo the same price as the previous Panasonic unit. The Samsung player jumps into the lead with this little feature AllShare: Sync up your entire household. A wired or wireless DLNA connection lets you stream your PC audio and video files to your HDTV using your remote. But it is knocked right off the pedestal when internet searching turns up conflicting reports of it’s ability to stream any old file. Sigh.

Right now we are going to stick with what we have. I’m just not ready to spend the money on something that may or may not work, especially since dragging out the laptop and plugging in an HDMI cable a couple times a week is really no big deal, plus this had the potential to develop into a money pit. For one it is $3 a month more to rent Blu-Ray from Netflix. Then the wireless G might not of hacked it streaming HD data, so another $70-80 would be needed for a new Wireless N router. Next the 7 year-old PC would have trouble keeping up serving the media. $2,000 later we would realize that a 32″ LCD wasn’t big enough to really enjoy our new found high definition video and the cheap $200 surround sound system wouldn’t sound good enough…