Blu-ray Player Reviews

User Interface
The LG player provides a colorful menu bar with selectable background skins. Spread horizontally across the screen there are five selections—Movies, Netflix, Photos, Music, and Settings. When a disc is inserted or a storage device is attached to the USB port, the player automatically recognizes it and places it under the appropriate icon. You can then choose specific images or music tracks from a disc or connected hard/flash drive right from the menu bar.

The remote is fairly large but lightweight. Under the navigational array are the transport keys—stop, play, skip, etc. There is no backlight, so you have to learn these keys by feel. Fortunately, the buttons are well-laid-out with sufficient space between them so you can learn their relative placements quickly.

Netflix
To access Netflix content, you need a broadband Internet connection. Since the BD300 also needs Internet access for firmware updates and BD-Live, you should probably set up the broadband connection in your initial configuration.

The speed of your broadband connection plays a vital role in the quality of the Netflix stream. If your connection is too slow, the stream may look more like something on YouTube or a dubbed VHS tape. According to LG's literature, you need at least 1.5Mbps, though 4Mbps is required for the best quality.

As a member of Netflix, you can set up an instant queue for streaming movies to the BD300. However, you cannot access the Netflix website from the LG player; you must go online from your computer.

After logging into your Netflix account, there is a tab called Watch Instantly. From there, you search through the movies that have been encoded for streaming. This is an important point because movies queued up for the regular Netflix service are not automatically available for streaming. You can only pick titles that have been encoded for this additional service, of which there are currently over 12,000.

The downside is that the streaming selections are limited to standard definition only and tend to be independent, foreign, and older films. Netflix says it is encoding new movies everyday, and HD movies with multichannel audio will soon be available—in fact, LG has announced a firmware update for the BD300 that allows HD streaming, but it wasn't available by the time this review was posted. We will add a discussion of this capability as soon as we can.

After you've queued up some movies or TV shows, you can choose a selection from your queue in the player's menu. The remote has all the command buttons you need to navigate through the simple and intuitive interface. When you go forward or backward through the incoming stream, you see thumbnail images, allowing you to visually search for a particular scene.

My Internet connection is very fast (6Mbps), so I received the full-quality stream. Still, it didn't look quite as good as an upconverted DVD. Also, when watching an episode from season 2 of 30 Rock, the audio was out of sync, and I had to start the stream over again, which fixed the problem.

The most positive thing about this feature is what it promises, not what it currently delivers. I wrote a review of the Roku Netflix Player for Home Theater, which includes in-depth details about this extension of the Netflix service.