Dick De Jong
April 28, 2010
HDTV Solutions

I swear I spent most of last week on the phone with technical support about one product or another.

And usually when I have to deal with those disembodied voices on the other end of the line reading from a script, I do swear, curse, fume and get scatological. If you have ever seen the YouTube video of Sawyer from Lost uttering his favorite expletive, you get the picture - just without the movie star good looks.

Although, I'll admit that my experiences this time were informative, productive and dare I say pleasant. Especially life affirming was the tech support woman from Linksys who pulled me back from the precipice and patiently walked me through setting up cascading wireless routers.

I'll reveal the necessity of that networking kluge when I write about the iPad, hopefully next week. First on the schedule is my review of the new Toshiba 55UX600U, a 55" LED LCD TV, which should be posted in the next few days.

For today, lets talk about upgrades to some of the products that I have already reviewed. Upgrades can come in different forms. There are the obligatory kind that mend what should not have been broken in the first place.

Or in this increasingly cross pollinated world of devices and software, often the manufacturer is fine tuning their product to work more seamlessly with another company's. Both patches are necessary and make our lives as consumers more copacetic.

With the sale of over 2.5 million copies of the Avatar Blu-ray disc, I am reading that for many people, the movie is not playing on their Blu-ray player. This situation is another prime example why you should keep your player updated.

If you do not have it connected to the Internet, you can still go online and download the latest firmware, transfer it to a USB flash drive and upload it to your player.

I realize that this process might seem odious, but keeping your Blu-ray player updated helps guarantee compatibility with the your Blu-rays.

With that housekeeping task out of the way, let's turn to a happier reason to update. Some upgrades are the unexpected ones like a gift when its not your birthday or a holiday.

I'm seeing more and more of these little windfall upgrades from manufacturers and unless you are keeping track, you may not know that they are available.

If you have an Internet connected device, the best way to keep up with upgrades is to turn on the Automatic Update feature. If an update is available, you will be notified and you can download it directly through your device. Of course, if you don't keep your unit plugged into the Internet, this method does not work and you will need to check the company's website for upgrade news.

Take for example, OPPO's BDP-83 Blu-ray player, which does automatically alert you to updates if it is connected to the Internet. Since I reviewed it last fall, OPPO has continued to refine and broaden the unit's performance. In January, their update debuted a new elegant interface with a couple of added features, BluTV and home network streaming.

I consider BluTV, (with its content limited to mostly games), a work in progress. The real bonbon of this upgrade is the ability to access and stream content from a DLNA computer or media server.

In late March, OPPO released a Public Beta firmware upgrade. Since this is a Beta version, it is not an official product and as such, it does not trigger the Automatic Update feature. Currently, this one can only be downloaded from the OPPO website.

More recently, I reviewed the Seagate FreeAgent Theater+ HD Media Player. At the time I was reviewing it, Seagate informed me that they would soon be adding a major Internet content partner. To their credit, they did not want to publicly say who until the upgrade was complete.

Last week, Seagate released the upgrade, which included Netflix as a new partner. I liked the Theater+ HD Media Player before, especially for its DNLA capability which was more powerful than other DLNA devices that I have encountered.

The addition of Netflix to their already extensive list of streaming content providers fills in a gap for those film fans looking for a huge source of movies.

If you read my review, you know that Seagate makes stylish hard drives, dubbed FreeAgent Go, that slip into a slot on the player. Right now, Seagate has a special offer on their portable 500 GB FreeAgent Go hard drive. In partnership with Paramount Pictures, Seagate has preloaded twenty movies including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, GI Joe, Ghost, and Coach Carter.

To activate those movies, you need to pay from $10 (Ghost) to $15 (GI Joe). As a bonus, Seagate is offering the preloaded Star Trek (the 2009 movie) for free when you register your drive. (You can read more about it here.)

I watched Star Trek and GI Joe and the picture quality was at least as good or better than a DVD, but not up to Blu-ray standards. You can fast forward through the movie, but it doesn't supply a menu nor a way to jump from chapter to chapter. And no Bonus Features are included.

Downloading movies to a hard drive is an interesting way to manage your film library, though I prefer the actual DVDs up on the shelf. Though considering that most of these movies at this resolution take no more than 2.5 GB each, you could fit about 200 films on this 500 GB drive.

Physically, the FreeAgent Go drive is about half the size of a DVD box and 200 boxes take up about ten feet of shelf space.

Then again with cloud computing becoming more prevalent and Internet speeds starting to climb above 15 Mbps and on the way to 100 Mbps, in a few years all of our media files will be stored in the ether patiently waiting for us to access them anywhere and anytime.

Stay tuned.