LG BD690 user reviews

Pros Great hardware (see summary below)

Cons Bad software (see summary below)

Summary I'm a veteran consumer software engineer (20+ years) and am appalled by the recent update to my BD-690 and its impact on my ability to stream Netflix content. Recent updates in the past months seemed to have been making the player less and less stable than it was when I first purchased it.

This latest update (Dec 2011) has really been bad for stability and usability. I have a screaming internet connection but suddenly I'm seeing all kinds of playback buffering problems with the latest release. Last night I had to keep pausing the movie I was watching so many times to let the buffer catch up (the playback started stuttering and pausing) that I finally gave up and went back to reading a book. At times the device just freezes in the Netflix UI. Pressing the Home button sometimes causes the device to shutdown. A couple of times I've had to do cold boots on the device just to get it to work properly again (for a while).

To make matters worse, the new Netflix UI has been given a facelift and in the process has become less usable for my main use case - finding and watching a movie in my queue. The new UI compacts the Netflix movie queue from a scrollable 5 thumbnail across table design (I could see about 25 movie thumbnails at time on my screen) into a single horizontal scrollable line (I can see about 5 movie thumbnails at a time). If you're like me and have a family with 100+ movies in the queue this is an awful, awful design decision.

Enough said. I was considering getting a new LG Smart TV for another room in the house but after this latest update I'm not sure I want to trust LG for my Netflix streaming needs.

Sincerely,
Paul Kissel