Audio Video News

I've mentioned the LG BD300 previously, when talking about Netflix's streaming video service. Blu-ray player with support for Netflix content, like the Roku Netflix player (currently available) and the Xbox 360 (available through a free interface upgrade in a few weeks). Today at CEDIA, LG officially announced the LG BD300, and gave it a sizeable price chop to boot.

While we previously thought the BD300 would retail for about $500 when finally released, LG has confirmed the player's MSRP as $399, putting it near the low end of similarly featured Blu-ray players (none of which support Netflix streaming).

Obviously, the big gimmick of the BD300 is Netflix content. Through a network connection, the player can stream video straight from Netflix's library of 12,000 movies and TV shows. If you have a Netflix membership, you automatically get access to its digital library, on top of your DVD and Blu-ray rentals. Set up a queue of up to 500 movies through Netflix's web page (over your computer; the player itself doesn't let you browse the library), and you can play them immediately on your TV.

While it sounds nice, a few significant issues keep Netflix streaming from being a genuine must-have home theater feature. For starters, the digital library consists mostly of older and esoteric movies. You can get some newer TV shows like The Office and Weeds, but the most recent big-name movie you'll find on there is 2006's Letters from Iwo Jima. If you want to watch a just-released summer blockbuster or academy award winner, you're better off just renting the disc and waiting for the mail. Worse yet, regardless of what video you stream, you can only watch it at standard definition. Netflix has plans to eventually support streaming HD content, but that's not going to happen in the near future.

Fortunately, the LG BD300 seems less like a Netflix streaming device with some Blu-ray support, and more like a Blu-ray player with the nice bonus of Netflix content. The BD300 is no slouch as a Blu-ray player, and comes with plenty of features you'd expect in a current generation model.

It supports both Blu-ray Profile 1.1 (Bonus View) and Profile 2.0 (BD Live), so you can enjoy all of the bonus features in both your older and newer Blu-ray discs. The player doesn't have any onboard memory besides a small cache, so it requires extra memory from a USB key or similar device to enable BD Live. Fortunately, USB keys are a dime a dozen these days, so it's not exactly hard to grab one and pop it in. It upconverts all standard definition DVDs to 1080p, though curiously doesn't do the same for SD DVD-quality Netflix content. On the audio side, it supports Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus, and can encode audio output as lossless PCM. Even if it didn't have the Netflix support, the BD300 is a pretty functional Blu-ray player.

While the official "launch" was today, the LG BD300 won't hit stores until mid-October. LG is planning an advertising campaign to push the BD300, so don't be surprised if you start seeing commercials for it as Halloween creeps near.