Page 1 of LG BD550 BD Player under 50 Sovs...

From Makro.
£39.99+VAT so roughly £47 take home.
Does BD Live, Network thingy, plays from external USB media incl. HDD, has MKV support and obviously 1080p Full HD.

No idea of build/playback quality yet but at less than £50 it had to be worth a go, especially as I fancied a media player with MKV support and this does that for me.

Has Composite (?? Seriously!), Component and HDMI outputs. No HDMi cable included as usual.
Will post more later when I finally get it out n set up but I`ve had an hour`s kip since yesterday and done a full night shift of 12 hours... <yawn>

Oh, and AFAIK anyone can now purchase via the Makro website. Player is a one week only deal though so if ya fancy it ya better be quick :)

Jimbo : oÞ

"There`s that word again... is there a problem with the Earth`s gravitational pull in the future?"

with deals like that and play.com doing £5 Blu Ray films now Blu Ray must be going mainstream now so more cheap quality films on Blu Ray :)

Will be interested to hear how mkv playback is on that machine. I`ve read generally on Blu Ray players it`s not as good as other media players, but things may have improved since then, and since that`s net workable should be upgradeable.

My Panasonic Blu Ray player does a great job of divx/xvid files, plays ones the Panasonic TV won`t but sadly neither do mkv :(

Well, tried a few TV eps in Xvid format that play tons better on this player than on my old Sumvision Phoenix Mk1.
Load time is very quick and playback quality is excellent.
Thought it had a problem with x264 codec but tried a different file and it played perfect so must have been a dodgy file.

Only MKVs I had to hand were Boardwalk Empire but played a few eps of that brilliantly.
DVD playback has been good and only a BD to test and it`s network features but the network stuff doesn`t really worry me tbh.
Definitely worth the £48 IMO

Jimbo : oÞ

"There`s that word again... is there a problem with the Earth`s gravitational pull in the future?"

Is the dvd part hackable for multiregion - seem to think you can`t make the bluray multi.
No sign of a hack - is it multi out of the box ?
Sounds like a good overall deal even so.....

It`s R2 out of the box and BD region B but I don`t have any "A" s to test if it locks or not.
I`ve found with a bit of trawling that it appears the player is based on Linux and there *IS* a hack out there but requires making or buying a small programmer that you dump a file to a USB stick, edit it, then reupload it.

I tried reading through it as playing with programmers doesn`t phase me but my head started to hurt with all that command line Linux stuff :-/

Jimbo : oÞ

"There`s that word again... is there a problem with the Earth`s gravitational pull in the future?"

Hi Jimbo, you still happy with this unit?

bloke at work wants a cheap Blu Ray player. Richer Sounds are doing it for £70, he just wants somehting basic, but would like mkv playback

Yup.
Hard to multi region though if that`s a concern, it`s a Linux based GUI and apparently you can reprogram it to make it MR but too much grief for me.

Very quick at reading drives, good, easy to use system once you get used to it and cracking quality.
Saying that... maybe I should try an actual BD disc in it.. I keep playing from my drives! Lol

Jimbo : oÞ

"There`s that word again... is there a problem with the Earth`s gravitational pull in the future?"

cool, cheers for the info. I don`t think he`s that fussed about multi region

Block Buster are doing a deal where you can get it for £90 but also get Toy Story3, Robin Hood, a couple of other Blu Rays and some cheap rentals!

Do you have a link to the MR info Jimbo?

Quote:
Chris Gould says...
Do you have a link to the MR info Jimbo?I did have, but I just went to my bookmarks to get it for you and it`s coming up as an error now :(
I`ll try it again in a bit to see if it suddenly starts working again.

Jimbo : oÞ

"There`s that word again... is there a problem with the Earth`s gravitational pull in the future?"