LG BD565 Blu-Ray DVD Player

I have had this blu-ray player for a few weeks now and I'm mostly impressed with it.
I got it to take over iPlayer and blu-ray playing from my PS3, and to see if it's up to the task of completely replacing my WD TV media streamer.

On the plus side, it has done just that and more. It's silent and fairly quick for a blu-ray player, recognises my NTFS hard drive and plays most of the videos, pictures and music without any issues. To make this review a little easier to digest, I've broken it up to the sections that matter most to me.

General build quality
The BD565 has a generic but sleek look to it. You definitely won't confuse it for a mini alien plane and you won't feel the need to hide it away in disgust either. On the front is a slot-loading drive basic media control buttons and a standard digital screen. These are hidden behind flaps to keep everything tidy.
Around the back are all the expected connections. HDMI, component, 2 channel audio, digital out and Ethernet.

One really silly move by LG is giving only one USB connection then sticking it right on the front of the player behind the flap. For my setup, I have an external USB drive permanently connected to it so it dangles out the front with the flap permanently open. This completely breaks the sleek look.

Start-up takes about 10 seconds, which is perfectly fine for me. One very annoying thing I must mention is that at the time of writing this, the BD565 cannot be found on the LG website. Only its older sibling the BD560 (identical only without iPlayer). Because of this, you cannot download firmware updates and update via USB. You have to connect the player to the server which is horrifyingly slow. It took 2 hours to download a 60MB file and install it on my 20Mbps internet connection.

Blu-ray / DVD playback
Disc playback on this is exactly as you would expect from a blu-ray player. Blu-rays take a while to load but not long enough to make anyone impatient. My Avatar bu-ray took about 15 seconds to load, but after that it was smooth sailing.

DVDs upscale nicely and the player will automatically obtain media info with screenshot, synopsis and list of cast if you're connected to the internet. That was an unexpected but nice feature

Video playback
I use a powered NTFS hard drive and most of my video files are in MKV, MP4 and AVI (divx and xvid). Navigating the menu is a bit sluggish and not very intuitive. For example, to do up a folder you must keep pressing up on the d-pad until it's off-screen. The back/return key takes you right back to the main menu. Silly design choice in my opinion but I quickly got used to it.
The playback quality is outstanding. HD videos are sharp and detailed and audio is reproduced well. You can fast-forward, rewind and jump to parts of a video with ease. Also you can switch audio streams and subtitles.

My only gripes are that with MKV files, this player does not support header compression (yet?) and it doesn't do a good job of remembering where you left off in videos to continue from where you left off. It has a `marker' feature but it loses all your bookmarks when you switch off the player. This defeats the whole point. Also, the first subtitle stream is always displayed by default and there is no way to change this. You will need to switch it off or to the correct language every time you load a video.

Music playback
Playing MP3s from the drive and music CDs works a treat. The player has a clean interface and the music info can be obtained online including album artwork. No complaints here.

Picture viewer
The BD565 can view JPEG files and has a slideshow feature. While it works just fine, it's VERY slow. I have a lot of pictures and they are about 1-3MB each. When browsing, the player will not allow you to do anything until it finishes loading every single thumbnail and that can take a while on each page. When viewing images, there is a 3 second load delay when switching between images. This is painstakingly slow when trying to flick through pictures. My advice is not to bother with this feature. Use your PC or PS3 for slideshows.

Streaming content
You don't get a lot of choice with the LG Netcast feature... BBC iPlayer, Youtube, Picasa and Accu Weather. I got this player for the iPlayer and while browsing the menus is sluggish, the actual streaming is beautiful. You even get the option to play the HD version of videos when available. Youtube works very well too but will only play in SD. I found Picasa and Accu Weather pointless though and would have preferred to replace them with 4OD and ITV player. iPlayer and Youtube work great though so I'm still very happy.

Remote and Simplink
The remote control is quite well made. It's slim and long, plus the media playback buttons are raised so you can control your content without the need to look at the remote. Very well designed.
If you have an LG TV then you can enjoy the Simplink feature which lets you control your TV's basic functions with the remote. You can control the volume, channel, AV mode and even turn the telly on and off. Also, whenever you switch the blu-ray player on, it will switch the AV mode to the player. Simple but nice feature.

Conclusion
Overall, this is a very good blu-ray and media player for the price. It has a few questionable design choices but nothing is actually broken or missing. There are some features that would have improved the player such as DLNA and faster menu browsing, but both would require hardware updates resulting in higher price.
At this price point, this player is fantastic and should easily be more than capable for 90% of people

Superb Blu Ray player, bought especially for its support for MKV files and NTFS support.
Added bonus of BBC I-Player Youtube & Picassa through the ethernet connection.
Only grumble is the fairly naff digital display but I soppose for this price you cannot expect much more.
Highly recommended.

This is my second purchase of bluray players for another room , picture quality second to none, loads disc in 15 secs , really good value.