Panasonic Shows Off BD-Live Blu-ray Player

Today Panasonic demoed for me its forthcoming DMP-BD50 Blu-ray Disc player. The DMP-BD50 was first introduced at CES in January, but the company had few specifics available at that time. Now, with a ship date of "late spring" looming, Panasonic not only had sample product to demo, but had more details to share about the player, too.

The biggest distinction between the DMP-BD30 and the DMP-BD50 is the addition of BD-Live. The BD-Live designation means the player can handle Blu-ray Discs that have Internet-connected content, such as interactive multiplayer games, and trailers and extra features you can download from the Internet to local storage, either in the player or on an external memory card.

The DMP-BD50 will cost $700?$200 more than the current DMP-BD30 model; both models will coexist through the summer. For the extra bucks, the DMP-BD50 adds the BD-Live support as well as adds in-unit decoding of advanced lossless audio codecs like Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.

The advantage to in-unit decoding is that you can then control the secondary audio mixing within the player (ie., when watching a picture-in-picture commentary track, you can pick which audio codec will be primary); this capability is not available to you if you output the raw audio track via bitstream and leave the decoding to the receiver.

Another nifty addition to this model: support for 24p playback of upconverted standard-definition DVDs.

Unfortunately, the DMP-BD50 lacks the minimum 1GB of onboard memory required for BD-Live. Instead, you have to bring-your-own SD Card for use in the player's SD Card slot. When I questioned Panasonic, company representatives could not yet offer a firm guideline as to its recommendation of what speed SD Cards you should use with the player.

The lack of the onboard storage is a major omission for such a premium Blu-ray player: Sony has already announced that its BD-Live player, the $500 BDP-S550 due out in the fall, will have 1GB of onboard storage.

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