Networking the Vizio VBR231 Blu-ray Player

I was apparently able to get the WiFi on the Vizo Blu-ray player up right away. I started to stream a movie. The first sign of a problem was that it complained about the speed of the network connection. I watched the video for about 10 minutes without a problem.

I then started to explore other features. I started using Pandora and found that it would not reliably stream audio. Later on, I found that the Vizio would not maintain a WiFi connection.

Yesterday morning I read the manual and noticed that the Vizio supports only Shared WEP. I changed my WiFi router to shared WEP. The Vizio connected to the WiFi easily after that and maintained stable connections.

Shared WEP provides an inferior level of security and Windows 7 will let you use it only by making a manual connection. I had to do this for both of our computers. The Microsoft Help screens were not accurate and it took me a while to figure out how to do it.

Yesterday afternoon I had trouble establishing a WiFi connection. I think it was because a file backup operation was saturating the WiFi network. After I interrupted the backup, I had no trouble establishing a stable connection and was able to watch a video for about 40 minutes. The video started quickly and streamed without any problems. Video quality was good, it seemed to be better than streaming directly from a laptop.