Am i right in thinking that to use BD-Live on your Blu-ray player you need to have the pc turned on, or can the player connect itself as long as the wireless router is turned on?
You don't need a computer, but you do need a connection to the router. Standalone BD players have an Ethernet port, not wireless, so you need to add an Etrhernet bridge to connect wirelessly to a router.
Pretty much, provided there's nothing weird going on at your router like having DHCP turned off or MAC Address filtering or blah blah. Try it first and if it works, there you go, if not, come back.