Official Panasonic DMP-BDT 220/320/500 Owners Thread - Page 70

anybody with a suggestion for optimum file formats for videos played via USB?

Can't Connect Wirelessly on New "Panasonic DMP-BDT220 Integrated Wi-Fi 3D Blu-ray DVD Player "

Hi All,

I'm a old-timer newbie struggling with a new "Panasonic DMP-BDT220 Integrated Wi-Fi 3D Blu-ray DVD Player".

When we turn on the Blu-Ray it takes from 4-7 minutes to "Connect", but after it does Connect, it only occasionally can then connect to Netflix, Amazon, etc.

The Panasonic is in a wooden entertainment center adjacent to a brick fireplace in our den. It's at the other end of the house, and downstairs, from where the router and PC are located. We really can't move the TV and Blu-Ray elsewhere in the den.

The unit says we have from 1 to occasionally 3 "signal strength" arrows (out of 5). Panasonic tech support said even 1 arrow should be adequate.

I have a D-Link N-router.

I tried to use a signal booster, and it boosted the signal elsewhere in the house, but not at the Blu-Ray..

We have RoadRunner Turbo and elsewhere in the house we are at 20-25M or higher. At the Blu-Ray it's under 1.5M.

I'm just about to give up, but I thought perhaps someone here might be able to suggest a fix.

Thanks for any help,


Alan

Most times DVD's have a feature that does not allow you to skip direct to the root menu...On my Oppo, I was able to skip the initial menu's on the DVD's and go "Direct" play of movie by pressing Stop and then Menu key on the remote..

Anything similar on BDT220?.., Don't want to go thru initial intro's all the time..
Edited by parry - 8/11/12 at 6:41pm

If anyone would care to help I would greatly appreciate it. If not, that is fine also. I have been looking for some setting questions but must have missed some. I have found some but need some more advice.
I have a Denon 3808CI and a Pansonic projector 3000. I first was wondering if anyone with those items have set their video and audio?
I was looking for sure to see what most have done for the
Picture Mode
Chroma Process
Detail clarity
Super Resolution
HDMI output
Black Level
For audio I have sound effects off, dialog enhancer off, dynamic range compression off, Dolby D/ Dolby D+ etc to bitstream, DTS etc to bitstream, secondary audio off,
PCM down conversion off BUT what should the downmix be? stereo or surround encoded?

If there are any setting you see I should change or anything special you think a person needs to do, please let me know. Thanks.

I have a BDT220 now, but I cannot remove the videos that I have watched already from the off the DVD's DNLA folder.

I have removed them from the folder on my PC, but they still show up in my movies list when I switch the BluRay player on and access the DNLA.

Is there a way of deleting these files, as I can't find anything in the options to do it.

The DLNA server running on your PC is still advertising the availability of those files. It must have some sort of "refresh" operation which looks at existing files and recreates the list.

What are the best recommended settings for setting up the BDT220 for Audio/Video and other settings..

I have a HDMI connection going into the AVR which then outputs to TV.

Anyone have an answer for the "connection to gateway" fail?? I see plenty of people that have the problem, but no solutions. I thought this was supposed to be great unit...but unless we can connect wirelessly, it's getting boxed back up and returned to the store.

Make sure the firmware in your router is up-to-date. You could try a wired connection just for test purposes.

You might consider using one of these Netgear products to get a hard-wired connection from your router to your BD Player:

Netgear Powerline Products

I use this in my house and it works just fine.

We can't do a wired connection - the router has to remain in a back room and we'd have to go out and buy a ridiculously long ethernet cable. This was the whole point of buying a wireless unit. Laptops and tablets are connecting fine in the same room, and always have. Apparently i didn't do enough research before I bought this unit.

Netgear routers, depending on the model, have been known to cause issues. A powerline adapter allows you to avoid long cable runs and are more reliable than wireless. I use them.

S~

Not a Netgear router. (Not sure if you were replying to me.)

I'm using 2 Airport Express Units (only 1 ethernet connection each) connected wirelessly to my Airport Extreme base station. With a setup like you are describing I could free up an electrical outlet near my equipment AND have 2 additional ethernet connects (4 port hub). Sounds like a great solution for an older home, and something I may try in the future.

Does anyone know how much performance may vary depending on the electrical wiring of the home?

If a wired connection would be "ridiculously long" then maybe the wireless connection is also too long for this unit, which doesn't appear to have a great radio. I agree with the suggestions that you consider powerline adapters. I don't use them for my Blu-ray, but I do use an older Panasonic pair for my main computer connection, and it works fine clear across the house.

There seems to be a bug in there. Does it say that it has connected to your home network though or it cannot even connect to your router?

If it connects to your home network router, try setting up dns to 8.8.8.8. And 4.4.4.4
Once it connects you can remove them.

So glad I only bought the 220 to play blu-ray movies; sounds like a freakin' nightmare to get it to do anything else.

The wire would be "ridiculously long" only because of how the rooms are situated and how we would have to run the cord. It's not more than 35 feet away, point to point. No way should that be too far.

Finally got my 1st ever blue ray player and have a few questions.
I picked up the new panny DMP 320 player to go with my new panny 60GT50 plasma tv.
BD player is connected with HDMI direct to tv.

Picked up about a 1/2 dozen blue ray movies from best buy today to try it out and was actually a little disapointed in pic quality. The player is set at default settings. All movies i picked up were in the $10 range. 1st movie I tried was THE PATRIOT and then watched the original TRANSFORMERS movie.

Both movies really didnt look any better than watching a movie on cinemax HD or showtime HD channels. Shouldnt Blue Ray movies look much much better?? Actually when i finished the transformers movie, shut down the player and then switched inputs back to cable, the tv was on a cinemax movie and it looked better than the blue ray movie.

Is there settings changes I need to make to the player?
Are these cheaper blue ray titles not as good of quality as others?

I also popped in a few regular DVD's and they looked horrible. (these were also older cheaper DVD's)
Is there special settings I need to make to make DVD's look better??

sorry for all the newb questions and ive searched for settings but havent been able to find any.

While discs are better on paper, it's usually hard to tell much difference because the higher bitrates on discs don't make any difference except during motion. I don't know about you, but it really hard for me to judge resolution differences while things are moving. So while the overall experience should be a bit better, it's not going to be night and day. The resolution on any static image is going to be the same on broadcast as it is on disc. However, something is definitely wrong if broadcast looks better than disc. I find that most effects in the player settings make the picture worse, so I always turn all that junk off. You also need to confirm that you're getting 1080p/24, if your tv can handle it.

The default settings on panasonic players will make DVD look like crap. During disc playback, go to the info screen and turn off super resolution and other effects. Some people prefer the artificial sharpness of the default settings, but I think they look terrible, resulting in halos and other detrimental effects.

Panasonic can only play MPEG2, MKV and WMV. Non-US players can also play Divx. I would say MKV is optimum since it has the best PQ at high compression, and the codec is free.

OK, so I bought the 320 this weekend, and here is what I am running into. It is driving me crazy!

Playing MKV files from USB works flawlessly.

Playing those same MKV files from a network share (Tried Windows XP, 7 and Ubuntu 12.04) is VERY slow. 720p content chokes up every few minutes, and 1080p content is just horribly slow. I look on the fileserver end, and the network is only hitting about 1.5-2.0MB/s. It is a 100 meg connection from client to server, and just one switch in between. I even tried my laptop directly connected with a crossover cable, and just a couple link-local addresses to remove anything else from the network, same thing. My guess is their CIFS implementation cannot handle the I/O required to play the files.

So I tried DLNA with PS3MediaServer, uShare, MediaTomb, and even Windows Media Player. The Bluray player wont even touch the MKVs with either of them serving it up. It is just an immediate "Cannot Play" without even an attempt. FLAC will play with everything, with no transcoding, and when Transcoding MKVs with PS3MediaServer, it produces a green garbled mess of randomness.

What in the world is going on here? I contacted Panasonic Support 3 times, and each time they say that if it can play via USB, then it should play via DLNA just fine, and they tested/designed it with WMP in mind for serving up the files. They even tested it on the phone with me and it worked fine for them on their end.

I tried putting just the video in an MP4 container, and it played that via DLNA flawlessly with the network peaking up to 3-4MB/s as needed.

Is anyone else having these same issues? I am ready to throw this thing back in the box and send it back to Amazon.

BDT220 owners..

For some reason the picture from Netflix/Youtube using HDMI is not as sharp and clear as compared to using it directly from my TV. What are the settings you guys using on BDT220?

DVD playback is super fine.
Edited by parry - 8/13/12 at 4:17pm

Parry, it may not be your settings. Different devices have different PQ when streaming. My Panny 110 has significantly better PQ streaming Netflix than my Panny VT30. What TV do you have?

I have a Samsung LED UN46D6050.

Didn't know that different devices would stream different quality..

Is there a way to resume or skip to a specific time when playing files via USB?

I have a BDT320 and I finally figured out how to format MKV files so they will play, but if I stop a movie in the middle, I can't figure out a way to resume watching where I left off.

If I try to fast forward, the fastest it will fast forward is maybe 2x but it's stops and stutters at about the same speed regardless of how fast I try to fast forward.

It would take a LONG time to get to an hour or more into the movie.

Is there a way to resume or jump to a particular time, etc.?

Thanks.

P.S. I just tried to resume, and it will resume playback, BUT once you try to play another file, you lose the resume info for the previous file. So I tried just re-starting the movie and pressing fast forward. It fast forwarded about 10 minutes into the movie and then quite out to the file list.

That's a real pain. So there's no way for me to get back to the middle of the movie without just letting it play for an hour or more to get back to where I was? That's not really useable. I am surprised no one has mentioned this unless I am missing the search or skip feature.
Edited by darinf - 8/14/12 at 2:19am

Does BDT220 have a web browser inbuilt or not?

You can make a CD-R of the firmware. Here's the instructions

http://shop.panasonic.com/docs/firmware-instructions/2012/video/blu-ray/dmp-bdt220/BDT220-FRM-INSTALL.pdf

support page with download firmware link: http://shop.panasonic.com/shop/model/DMP-BDT220?t=downloads&support#tabs

Since the 220 is only 2.4Ghz I'm wondering if your Netgear is setup to go to 150mpbs or 300mbps. If it's 300, try 150. Unless you have FIOS Quantum service it shouldn't make any difference to you as you need to get upto 10mbps for the better movie services (VUDU HDX). You can also give a shot to Up to 54mbps which should still give you enough throughput but better coverage in your home.

There are a number of what is sometimes referred to as wireless gaming adapters for Xbox/PS3 etc. which can be used and Belkin and other have Wireless Extenders which once configured with your settings will simply repeat the WiFi signal. (I'm beta testing one for a oem now, and I can get a 5 bar signal in rooms that I never got a single bar in before, so there must be competitive devices).

So I'm seeing conflicting reports in terms of comparing DVD upscaling between the last few generations of Panasonic players. Does anyone that has had experience with a BD 65/85, BDT 110/210, and/or BDT220/320 care to weigh in? I am generally hearing that BD quality is going to be about the same, so at least that is consistent (though I realize load times have improved with time). I'm wondering if I could save a few bucks and grab a used BD65/85 and be just as happy for my occasional DVD and BD needs. Anymore, the bulk of my watching is streaming and I'm covered there with a Roku XS. The DVD upscaling is important though, because I do have quite a few DVD's that I'd like to milk for all they are worth.