Friday, September 3, 2010

Ratings for the Vizio VBR231 Blu-ray Player

Here are my current thoughts on how the Vizio VBR231 stacks up:

  • Playing Blu-ray disks: quality very good, but there is no display showing how long the disk has played.
  • Playing DVDs: quality good, but there is no display showing how long the disk has played.
  • Network setup: D due to requirement to support Shared WEP
  • Network operation: B+ connects immediately except when running a file backup across the WiFi network.
  • Service Availability: B+ due to limited set of applications supported; however Netflix streaming and Pandora are very good.
  • Service set up: A very easy
  • Service operation: A easy to use
Over all I am very happy with the unit , especially at the $150 price point that includes WiFi. I think that Vizio has some work to do on the WiFi support so that it fits more easily into home networks. At a minimum, Vizio should support Open WEP.

We are watching or listening to streamed content nearly every day. It is a great supplement when we cannot find anything interesting the broadcast channels. I think that Internet streaming to the TV will become an important outlet for video content over time. It will be something that the Pay TV providers have to include in their offering. I think that Internet streaming to the TV will bring the cost of Pay TV down as more people "cut the cord" as I have done and replace Pay TV services with a combination of broadcast and Internet streaming content.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

do you know if there is a way to stream any video feeds from your computer to the VBR231 player and watch it - kind of in the same fashion that you can do with an X-Box360?

Bob Larribeau said...

No, there is no way to do this. You can do this kind of thing with a TiVo.