A Blu-ray Player with a Hard Drive?
March 31st, 2010 by Chris M
Now that the Consumer Electronic Show has come and gone once again, audio and video nuts (me included) can read up on the latest products that will be released this year. One of the stand-out products I noticed was the new LG BD590 Blu-ray player. It has many of the same features as last year’s model, but with the addition of a 250 gigabyte hard drive.
The first question I had was “Can Blu-ray movies be ripped to this hard drive?” Unfortunately, the answer is no. At 250 gigabytes, it wouldn’t hold very many HD movies anyway. The purpose of the hard drive is for consumers to store pictures, personal movies, music, and downloaded VuDu movies. It is meant to be more of a multi-purpose box, not just a Blu-ray player. It has built-in 802.11n WiFi connectivity, but oddly enough consumers cannot transfer their music of photos via the wireless connection. You can use the RJ45 Ethernet port or the USB connection instead.
Another exciting addition on this player is the inclusion of Gracenote’s MusicID-Stream™ . If you are playing back any movie, TV show, or any other media through the Blu-ray and hears an unknown song, you simply push a button on the remote and Gracenote’s MusicID-Stream™ will instantly provide artist, genre, and album cover art for the unknown song. This same technology also allows the you to easily archive the music they rip to the hard drive. I believe this will be a big winner.
