more on disc players

A few weeks ago I posted some comments about the future of playing compressed video files and the problems some people are having with the current crop of disc players.
I thought it might be good for everyone to share their success or lack of it and a few people contacted me privately, but only Victor in Texas posted a public comment. Thanks Victor.

A couple weeks ago I was grocery shopping in Costco and they were selling Samsung BD-JM57C players for about $90. If you look in the lower left corner of the photo you see a blue right arrow
in a circle and under it is "Multi Codec". The same symbol appears near the top right and under it says "The most competitive number of codecs available to cover various multimedia formats".
Well, that sounded good to me, so I bought one.

I connected it to the big TV my wife watches. It very easily found my home wireless router and connected to my home wireless network. It has built-in software for using the internet services shown on the box plus many more not shown. 
I keep a 32 GB USB flash drive plugged into my wireless router to host files that I may wish to view on my tablet sitting out by the pool...or wherever. The player found that source and easily streamed them to the TV. 

I also loaded a bunch of .avi files onto another one and plugged it into the USB port on the disc player and it was very easy to navigate to that source and play files from it. The player also responds quickly to remote control functions.

I then loaded several discs onto a 2 TB Toshiba portable external USB hard drive. I plugged it into the USB port on the disc player and it quickly recognized and loaded the files and played them flawlessly. 

These little USB-powered drives sell for about $100 and can hold the equivalent of about 400 data DVD's. I would not suggest that anyone takes 400 discs and copy them to a single drive, as that is 

very time-consuming even with USB 3.0 connections. But if you keep a free 2 TB or 3 TB hard drive on a PC for video files, you can create your own playlists and copy the folders to one of these drives and not have to even think about discs for months.....unless you're an insomniac and have the TV on 20 hours a day. 

Finally, for about the past 11 days my wife has been watching her shows from data discs (avi files)

to test the disc player and has not had any issues with any file, show or disc.

So I thought I would share that with you.

Once again, discs are not the future, or even the present, any more than VHS cassettes are, but they are fairly reliable data storage containers if handled properly. Streaming video from a home network or some type of flash memory device results in virtually no wear and tear on your player. There's no motor required to spin discs and no hot laser required to transfer data to the processor. 

Also, mp4 HD files are now the standard. I need to convert-down nearly every thing to .avi format.

I'm not sure if this Sanyo player will play .mp4 discs, I should try it, but if you've already moved away from discs and would prefer 720 HD mp4 for current shows, talk to me.