What Blu Ray Player should i buy??????

[admin_exported]

I have just gone out and bought the new panasonic v10 and curretly have a ps3 which i think is wicked.

Now i need a second bluray player so one can go in he bedroom and don't know which to buy roughy upto £300

Firstly can i PS3 be made regoin free

If so should i buy another ps3, new panasonic bluray thats just been reviewed or a sony because i know they can be multi region

plus the ps3 dosent come up as HD sound on the reciver???

 

[poolmaster]

I think you should go for the pioneer bdp-51fd if you can find one.

This should be your main player as movies are much better on the pioneer than the ps3 or so i'm told by others on the forms.

The pioneer also exceeds my expectations with music too. If you go for this one be sure to upgrade the firmware of the pioneer by visit the pioneer web site to get dts hd master audio

sorry don't know if you can make ps3 region free

 

[professorhat]

It's not really possible to make the PS3 region free I'm afraid - there may be some sites which offer dodgy firmware to do it, but I'd say it's not worth the risk as (a) it could "brick" your PS3, making it unusable and Sony will not replace it since you've put non-official software on it - it will certainly void your warranty, even if everything works okay and (b) the next firmware update from Sony will replace it meaning you could never upgrade the firmware again and thus miss out on any potential updates in the future.

For other players, are you looking for DVD to be multi-region or both DVD and Blu-Ray? If just DVD, most of the common players from Panasonic, Sony and Pioneer can be made multi-region at no extra cost. If you're looking for multi-region Blu-Ray, this generally increases the price of the player. You can see some examples on this site (NB - although I've used this site, I'm not necessarily recommending them as it was a long time ago!). However, I would put out that a lot of US Blu-Rays are also region free meaning multi-region for Blu-Ray isn't as key as it was for DVD. To find a list of all the region free releases, take a look at MovieTyme's website who independently check each title to ensure it is region free.

As for the PS3 not displaying HD sound on the receiver, this is because the PS3 is unable to bitstream (i.e. send natively) the HD audio codecs. What it can do is decode these formats onboard to multichannel PCM - so if you have the PS3 set to output as Linear PCM, this is what it's doing. So although the receiver does not display the format, you are still getting HD sound, it's just the decoding was done within the PS3 instead of within the receiver. You can easily check this by pressing Select when a movie is playing - the format that is being decoded will be displayed in the top right hand corner.

 

[cloud7]

PS3 handles the hd audio very well!