Sony BDPS370 Blu-ray Player

I bought this to go with my Sony KDL-40W4500 - 40" Widescreen 100hz / 1080P Full HD Bravia LCD TV - With DLNA Technology & Freeview as I knew it would not only connect up simply but also be perfectly linked up on the Bravia's menu's and I could put aside my main remote or use either the TV or Blu-Ray one for most functions. The Blu-Ray one even has a handy off button for the TV as well as one for the Blu-Ray player.

Connecting up to the TV: Using a HDMI cable, I used the one I had already for my DVD player, had it for ages and is nice and solid. Snakebyte Mamba Premium 3D Audio/Video HDMI Cable (PS3/Xbox 360) and then plugged the player into the mains. Easy! If not this one then there are so many HMDI cables out there with great reviews that will do perfectly. Just search HDMI cable, Amazon Basics do sell a decent looking one for not much at all.

Connecting up to the Internet: We have a standard router and seeing as I will be using the online services such as iPlayer, 5 on demand, online film rental services and Youtube etc then I'll need a constantly good broadband supply to the system. I have used a couple of homeplugs/eplugs, which you may or may not know much about. They use the house electrical wiring (nothing technical or dangerous is required to be done, all external) to give you broadband direct link up with standard ethernet cables. We have one plug one next to the router upstairs and the other downstairs in the nearest plug to the Blu-Ray player.

The homeplugs we have are: Hercules ePlug 200 Duo (200Mbps Powerline Communication) 2 Adaptor Pack and have been great for the last year for Laptops, PC's, our consoles etc. Again I know there are some other ones out there, but I have some other Hercules products and they have always been reliable and this one is nice and solid (see my other video review on this) so recommend that one. Alternatively Sony do sell a WiFi adaptor, but I don't know too much about it and my house has old stone walls so WiFi would not get a great connection to our router upstairs.

Setup: This took maybe 5 mins max for the system to download the latest firmware, I recommend doing this once a month maybe, though I think the system does automatically tell you when it needs doing. It does appear that every time you use the online services like iplayer it will check configuration, so i recommend using something reliable like a homeplug or just have your router near the TV so you can go direct into it.

Used a few different files now through a USB stick going into the slot on the front of the player and all seem to work fine, divx files for movies, so far they have all been avi files and audio files in mp3. You can access video, audio and photo through the home screen where everything else can be found, just pick the usb and then your files from there. You can look at photos on there too, they look great on the big screen, really useful for showing the family holiday snaps. Most camera's are high res enough for good quality nowadays. Works fine with jpg's which is what most camera's use now. Just drop them onto your usb stick and away you go.

Tried attaching my Buffalo Juststore 500GB USB 2.0 Slimline Portable External Hard Drive - Black through the usb port at the front but i can confirm this did NOT work, just usb memory sticks as far as i can tell.

UPDATE 18th January 2011: After reading a review posted here titled Sony BDPS370 Blu-ray Player on 14 Jan 2011 it seems external hard drives can be connected after being formatted FAT32, it might be a bit technical for the average user, including me, but i'm willing to to give it a try, but not on my buffalo as that's my main ipod backup, will try with another one and update when i can confirm.

Picture and Sound Quality: On Blu-Ray's, I only have a couple so far but I can say it is incredible, I guess it does all depend what screen you have too and your speakers but with the Sony TV it looks and sounds amazing. On the DVD's I have used I can see a noticeable difference in the quality and I'm sure the sound has improved too. Started going through my collection again to re-experience them.

Build Quality, everything is really solid and well made and I like that the buttons are almost hidden and the unit is very small and sleek, none of that nasty big clicky buttons. The Remote is as expected, nice and solid and just a different size to the TV one.

Can't recommend this enough for it's value and quality. Would totally recommend using with a Sony TV though to improve your experience further.

UPDATE 5th January 2011: After a few people asking about whether the player makes a high pitched wirring noise, according to other reviews it is whilst playing Blu-rays and noticeable when in quiet moments in films and some say it gets quieter continiously and dissapears about half way through the movie. From me at the moment from the couple I have tried I don't recall it being present at all. I will be trying this out and listening closely tonight and will most likely post up a video review late tonight to display my findings and anything else,so check back tomorrow. Will also update the written review.

LATEST UPDATE 5th January 2011: Reported High Pitch Noise Test. Tested 2 blu-rays and no high pitched noises at all during playback were heard. If your one does that then I suggest sending it back for a replacement as my first one is perfect!

UPDATE 17th January 2011: Still working fantastic with no problems reported. really like the remote and the fwd button as it just skips you fwd at 15sec jumps, which is great for box sets like 24 where the 2mins of each episode are updates from the last, getting you to the action in just a few clicks!

UPDATE 18th January 2011: After Trying 4 types of files via the USB stick in the USB port I can confirm that for me AVI and MP4 files DID work and MOV and MKV files DID NOT work. If anyone finds different please do let me know.

UPDATE 20th January 2011: Someone asked me about LAN setup, so I've just copied the setup instructions from the manual here:

***Connecting to the Network***

Wired Setup
Use a LAN cable to connect to the LAN (100)terminal on the player.
To set the network settings
Select "Network Settings," "Internet
Settings," then "Wired Setup" (page 26), and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the setup.

USB Wireless Setup
Turn off the player, then connect the USB
Wireless LAN Adapter (UWA-BR100 only available as of January 2010) to the USB jack on the front or rear of the player.
The USB Wireless LAN Adapter may not be available in some regions/countries.

If you find this useful, why not give me a thumbs up :) Thank you!

UPDATE 21st Jan: Just read an announcement that the Opera Web browser will be available in the future for use with the Sony Bravia TV's and Blu-Ray players. However, this is NOT available yet. Good news for the future though. If you have a Wii you will probably already be using opera browser for internet through your TV though. I'll update when it's available.

Also check out the comments section for lots of questions from Amazon customers, the answers from myself and many other very helpful Amazon customers too. Thank you everyone for your input! :)

I've never been one for Sony's hi-fi gear as I prefer the sound of other manufactures' equipment, but I had been looking for a blu-ray player that met my requirements for over a year now. I was waiting for Oppo's BDP-831, which was inexplicably cancelled about a week after receiving 5 star reviews in the major home cinema and hi-fi magazines. Then the Cambridge Audio 650BD came out for the about same price as the Oppo's SRP, but had worse quality DACs and Video scaler, which put me off.

Then the Sony came out that played most of the disc types that the Oppo and Cambridge Audio players (all but DVD-Audio) for less than half the price of those players. Chuck in iPlayer support and I was sold!

I'm very glad I decided to get this player. It loads Blu-Ray films faster than a Playstation 3, DVDs faster than my old Denon 1920 DVD player. DVD up-scaling is strong, with the exception of line drawn animation (like Family Guy or The Simpsons) which sometimes causes thin horizontal lines to shake and break up. Blu-Ray playback is excellent and stable, provided you have a TV that can display 720p or 1080p at 24 fps.

On-line content was fairly good, but I was unable to play HD content from LoveFilm or YouTube without buffering problems on my "up to 8Mb" from Tiscali (which was no faster than when I had their "up to 2Mb" service). iPlayer has no such problems though as the BBC's servers are much faster than the afore mentioned services.

A nice surprise was finding that the USB playback feature does support H.264/AVC video in a .MKV container (it's not mentioned in the blurb, but is mentioned in the manual), so you can playback all those (legally acquired) TV shows you've downloaded from the Internet.

Multi-region DVD playback can be achieved via universal remote (e.g. One4all, with the magic button, and Logitech Harmony) hacks, which are the same as they were for the BDP-S360 (easily found via a Google search). There is no such easy hack for multi-region Blu-Ray playback however. On some players multi-region Blu-Ray playback can be achieved via a hardware hack, but that would invalidate your warranty, so for most it's not worth the risk. However, region coding on Blu-Ray discs is optional and many "region A" Blu-Ray discs are actually region free.

If I had one niggle with the player it would be that it doesn't have built in wireless networking, and the Sony wireless network USB dongle is an expensive add-on which sells for 5 times the going price of other wireless network USB dongles. This alone though is not enough for me to dock a star on an otherwise exemplary player.

DLNA Update (updated 27-3-2012):
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Having recently built a NAS machine (using FreeNAS), which has UPnP/DLNA support, I thought I'd give the BDP-S370's DLNA client feature a whirl. The first thing I found was that the Sony player was quite fussy and I was unable to get it to connect to FreNAS's FUPPES UPnP service (despite trying the DLNA and PlayStation 3 profiles). I started to search around for alternatives that I could install on my main Windows 7 64 bit PC (with an eye for using Windows Home Server 2011 instead of FreeNAS). I tried Tversity, but no joy, then I tried the Sony recommended Serviio, but the software didn't function at all. Finally I tried TVMOBiLi, which was picked up by the BDP-S370 immediately.

With TVMOBiLi's transcoding feature disabled, I was able to test a range of formats including MP3, FLAC, AVI (DIVX), MKV, MPEG-2, MPEG-TS, MPEG-M2TS and MP4. FLAC wasn't supported, which is no surprise, but MKV, MP4 and MPEG-M2TS were also not supported, which is odd considering that the BDP-S370 is quite happy playing these formats on a USB hard drive. (Strangely MPEG-TS files have the M2TS icon the the Xrossbar UI, despite MPEG-TS and MPEG-M2TS being different and the BDP-S370's inability to play MPEG-M2TS via DLNA).

I then turned on TVMOBiLi's transcoding feature and was able to then playback a FLAC (transcoded to LPCM, sans meta-data) as well as an MKV file, transcoded to MPEG (though I'm unsure as to which flavour of MPEG). The FLAC file had a pause of around 3-8 seconds before playback commenced, with the MKV file it was more like 20-40 seconds. When the transcoded MKV started playing back it had a noticeable judder in it, no doubt caused by the computer to do real-time transcoding of a 720p MKV.

I then re-muxed the 720p MKV into a MPEG-TS stream (using tsMuxeR) and tried playback again. Playback was smooth which suggests that the problem was indeed the transcoding (and not the wireless network).

Another thing that struck me, when browsing a large music share, was how inadequate the Xrossbar UI is when dealing with a large number of files in any given folder. Thankfully TVMOBiLi creates several pseudo folders which make navigation easier (e.g. Artist -> A-C -> Allison Crowe -> Secrets), but even then it is still a rather long winded process.

I recently tried Serviio out again with a Windows Home Server (WHS) 2011 PC (a HP Micro Server) as a new Serviio plugin for WHS has been released and it worked well, though the PC was underpowered for transcoding video, so I stuck to DIVX AVI, MPEG and MPEG-TS for the video files. Recently I found that tsMuxeR was no longer working with some MKVs, but I've recently come across a new tool called Rebox.NET, which can convert MKVs to MPEG-TS (without transcoding), and it seems to work with more files than tsMuxeR does.

Truth be told, the BDP-S370's DLNA support is not overly useful due to its weak video container support - connecting a USB HDD is a better (not to mention easier and cheaper) option.

Wireless networking update (new):
---------------------------------

We all know that the official Sony dongle is extortionate at nearly 70% as much as the player itself. I was on the Sony forums and a user mentioned this Netgear adaptor: Netgear WNCE2001 Universal WiFi Internet adaptor 802.11n, which is cheaper (it works by connecting to the BDP-370's LAN socket and uses its USB socket for power). You'll need a laptop to set it up, but for the saving it's worth the additional hassle if you are comfortable with setting up a wireless network.

This Buffalo adaptor should also work Buffalo AirStation Nfiniti Dual Band Wireless-N Ethernet Converter, Access Point and Bridge - Wireless bridge - 802.11 a/b/g/n - desktop. It has two LAN sockets, so it would be useful if you have say an internet connected TV as well as an internet connected Blu-ray player. The downside is that, unlike the Netgear, it occupies a mains power socket.

I haven't personally tried either solution as my BDP-370 is close enough to the router to be connected via LAN cable, but I thought the option was worth mentioning. If you do try either, please post a comment to let me know how you got on.

Sound Review (Updated):
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I've now had the opportunity to assess the Sony BDP-S370's sound vs. my Denon 1920 (a DVD/SACD/CD player). When playing SACDs (Super Audio CDs) the old Denon beat the Sony hands down, achieving greater detail and clarity, while delivering a more realistic sound. I somewhat expected this as the Denon has a DSD based DAC which is the native format of a SACD, while the Sony has to convert the DSD signal to a PCM one as it has a PCM based DAC.

I then moved onto an Audio CD and a 24/96 DVD, both of which are PCM based, which means the Denon should be at a disadvantage. However, the Denon once again delivered better detail and clarity, while once again delivering a more realistic sound.

So in summary while the Sony is a good performer in movie sound, it is less accomplished as a music player and could do with some UK tuning or some component upgrades. However, perhaps this is slightly unfair as the Denon's price as new was £100 more than the Sony's new price, however the Denon is also 5 years old so things should have improved since then. I believe that Sony's next player up Sony BDP-570 is supposed to have improved audio circuitry and 7.1 analogue outputs, but if other reviews are right, then this upgrade has done nothing to improve the musicality. So I guess I'm saying that if you are more of a music person than a film person, then the Sony players may not be the right fit for you.

Further to my previous comments, I tried using the analogue audio outputs on my Samsung TV instead of those on the the Sony player. When I did the sound was immediately and substantially improved. I can therefore conclude the BDP-S370's weakness with sound lies with the analogue outputs (OPAMPs/DACs). This means that if you have a home cinema amplifier with HDMI, then you can effectively sidestep this weakness.

Internet Video Update:
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Sony have just added 'Demand Five' (Five's catch-up service) to the internet video section. I watched Archer and part of Chinese Made Easy, both streamed comfortably with excellent quality, which was as good as (if not better than) Freeview (SD)!

Unfortunately I just discovered that the Drama section (i.e. CSI, Grey's Anatomy, etc.) is not available via the Bravia Internet Video version of Demand Five, which Five informed me is due to licensing issues. This majorly affects its usefulness as Five's main shows are dramas, but you can still use it to catch up on Home and Away and Neighbours.

NEW: Sony have added their own video on demand service, Qriocity, which contains a meagre selection of films in SD and HD. Pricing for the Qriocity films ranges from 4. Read more ›

Just got this today for a relatives birthday present. Extremely fast and slick but was at first disappointed that the BBC iplayer wasnt available this afternoon when i looked for it. Just got an update this evening (31/3/2010) and now BBC iplayer works perfectly, and yes, BBC HD works like a dream on iplayer. Had no problem streaming Lovefilm movies to my TV although I consider myself lucky as our Sky broadband is around 13 meg speed in real terms. Another thing is that it looks like Lovefilm will go HD with their service on this player as you can watch HD trailers of the latest films streamed from the net. Youtube HD videos also work here unlike the LG370 we have which just streams SD at the minute. Hope this helps you makin up your mind about this player. We bought it for the online and catchup tv facility. One last thing is the HD streaming to the player looks the same quality as blu ray discs although our TV is 720p only. Lovefilm SD movies are the same quality as ordinary DVDs (or near DVD at least)