MoCA® Blog : Coax Networking

BD-Live Experience

September 10, 2009 at 12:06 pm Sharath Leave a comment

I recently purchased a brand new Blu-ray player, the Panasonic DMP-BD80 from Amazon. I thought of which movie to get and decided upon The Dark Knight.

As soon as I received the Blu-ray player, I immediately connected it up to my HDTV via HDMI cable and connected it to my network using the Netgear MCAB1001 MoCA Adapter. I put in the Blu-ray disc and waited for the movie to start. Then pulled up the menu and clicked on Warner Bros. BD-Live. I get a message dialog that pops up with the following message.

This feature playable only on Blu-ray Disc players with BD-Live capability, appropriate Internet connections and sufficient storage. Additionally, your playback device may require a firmware upgrade. Not all playback devices are upgradeable. To determine if your playback device is upgradeable, consult your hardware manufacturer for more information.

After checking to see that there was an internet connection and the firmware was properly upgraded on the Blu-ray player, I decided to give it another try. The same message kept appearing, so I gave in and looked at the setup instructions that came with my Blu-ray player. On the back side of the setup sheet it says that if there are problems with accessing BD-Live to make sure that

1.)    The Blu-ray disc is BD-Live capable.

2.)    The Internet connection is properly established with the Blu-ray player.

3.)    To make sure that an SD card is inserted into the SD slot in the player.

I could not believe what I was seeing; I was required to purchase an SD card to use a function on my player. Outraged, but determined to use BD-Live I went out and purchased an SD card. After plugging it into the player and clicking on Warner Bros. BD-Live, Warner Bros. requires you to login, so if you don’t have a Warner Bros. BD-Live account you have to make one, luckily, you can do that directly on the TV itself.

After logging in, I realized that there was quite a bit of content available. There were some Batman Begins comics that talk about Ra’s al Ghul, some Batman Beyond-esque comics called Mad Love, and some content for The Dark Knight. In addition, there were features so that you can watch the screening with a bunch of friends, which is pretty interesting. There are a bunch more features to check out.

All-in-all, it was a good experience, after being able to get to the content. It is unfortunate that there is no direct streaming capability for BD-Live, which would have made it much quicker to use. Now I can see why BD-Live are not more popular, it is by no means bad, but the experience of trying to get it working, can be frustrating.

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