Pioneer BDP-51FD Blu-ray Player Comments

"along with the sluggish disc loading and boot-up times " and it's got 10 star performance? Also... 8/10 for features, yet it lacks the basic bd-live functionally?
Seriously, wtf?? I think I'll look for a different review site, one which is reliable and I can "trust".

So if all that is really different under the hood is the video DACs (which are only used for converting video to analogue) then the output from the HDMI port should be identical to that from the BDP-71? Similarly, gold-plated jacks aren't much good if you're exclusively using HDMI to extract both video and audio, right? The more I think about it, the less I am interested in BD-Live - yes, there may be some interesting applications of it in future, but for now it just seems to be used as a hook into advertising, trailers and worthless added content.

BD live is just something that should have been in the spec from the beginning.. the fact that they haven't put a lot on there yet is irrelevant. They'll use it much more in the future. For instance Zach and Miri doesn't have a commentary on it because kevin smith didn't record one before the deadline set for the DVD/blu-ray. They are putting that up on the bdlive menu at some point... You can dismiss the functionality right up until there's something you want. Personally, it's worth it for the auto firmware updates alone.

Two questions:
1. Why is it so big?
2. Who actually buys players without HDDs in them now anyway?

@SRS eh? Hardly any Blu-Ray players have got HDDs in them, in fact the only one I can think of is the PS3, and it doesn't use it for Blu-Ray playback as far as I know - what would be the point of an HDD in a vanilla movie playing box?

I think it's an excellent piece of equipment, superb picture performance, and, provided you update the firmware to 1.21 from 1.08, pretty quick in setup and disk load.
My only complain so far it's that infact it's not compatible with home-burned divx although "divx certified". I hope this bug will be resolved with the next firmware update!
Ciao

Hi guys, despite the instructions don't really help, finally the player handles home burned divx through the "home media" menu. Well done! Now it's 100% what it should be!. Ciao

In terms of picture quality and sound, can anyone please tell me How this Player compares to the Panasonic BD35.

I appreciate the "TR" criteria for validating Pioneer blu-ray player. The picture quality must be more important than BD live "gaming performance".
For those who prefer to play, the Sony playstation should be on the list.

The picture quality of blu-ray titles, as far as I can tell from 2 feet away on a small, 42" 1080P set is marginally better than that of other players such as PS3 and Panasonic BD series. The audio quality out of HDMI is superb. I mostly enjoy rock/classic/vocal jazz and I love hearing every little discrete details of my audio pieces, including the breathing of the vocalists in between long notes. This is the first video player I felt that lets me enjoy as much audio details as it pleases with the rich video details.

The unique, and developed only for Pionner upconverting chip is now currently the best upconverting cpu available (it does a significantly better job with the new firmware) it uses now spits out near blu-ray quality from my DVDs.

Last weekend, I had my videophile friends over to watch Return of the King and being Blu-ray player owners themselves, they kept asking me where in the world I got my hands on the Blu-ray version of the movie.

After trying serveral players, I'm happy to report that I'll be keeping this player for now as it IS the best looking and sounding blu-ray player on the planet. New players are just around the corner from being released. We'll see what April brings.

A word on divx and H.264
BTW, this player does NOT play divx nor any of the H.264 files I've encoded myself. As of today, the latest firmware has NOT solved this issue.

I find the time for the disc trey to open and close very slow. also slow is the time for the program to start. I used to own an old pioneer dvd player. It was much faster. What about firmware? Will it help? How does one use firmware?