Rant: Front Panel Controls on Bluray players

[Chris15]

Apparently is is impossible to find a Bluray player in the consumer sector (budget is not conducive to a pro grade player) that has any more than play, stop and eject on the front panel...

I really liked DVD players that had those plus pause and FFwd and Rewind, it meant you could stick them into a rack and leave them without remote control and people could still use it for all the basics - needinga remote only if there was a complicated menu.

They were also usable as a CD player wiithout needing a remote or a display device turned on...

Wakeup manufacturers, if you can produce something with a decent front panel interface, your institutional customers will be onto it in an instant. Think lecturer in a univeristy, they don't want to have to muck around with a touch panel, they want to stick a disc in and hit play and then pause it to talk about whatever and hit play again... University AV departments generally have half a brain so the remote control goes nowhere near the academic staff...

[/rant]

[MNicolai]

Front-panel controls won't come back.

We recently had trouble of our own finding a DVD or Blu-Ray player with discrete 5.1 outputs we could route through the sound system. A week of searching yielded only a single device for a couple hundred bucks -- we ended up buying the last one in stock. Everything these days has optical out, audio piggybacking on HDMI, or coax.

[rwhealey]

How about Oppo? High end home theater stuff, but it has both front panel controls and 5.1 analog outputs.

[headcrab]

If it were my problem, I'd stick a blu-ray drive in some computer and have all the controls I could ever not want, as well as 5.1 output. Of course, that only works if you have competent technicians available. Otherwise, there are even more problems with using a computer.

[MNicolai]

I'd prefer a computer too, but our video system is a bit aged and doesn't have the capability of DVI or VGA video. Replacing our video controls systems will be a project for another day.

As for the Oppo stuff -- I'm intrigued, but it's also 2-4 times what we ended up spending.

[museav]

Don't you just put it on 'the network' and use an app on your iPthingy/tablet/smartphone to control it? That seems to be the model many consumer products are adopting.

Most of my university clients are including Blu-Ray players in systems but more as a backup. They seem to find that not only do most people automatically use the computer for media playback whenever possible, but accessing front panel controls often means walking and/or bending over to get to the equipment and then struggling to read and decipher the controls that are labeled and arranged differently on different devices. I also don't think I've ever encountered a room with just a Blu-Ray player as the only possible source and if someone has to select the Blu-Ray as the display source, turn on the projector or flat panel, adjust volume, etc. then they're probably going to be using a control panel anyways. So I seem to be getting a very different perspective from my university clients.

The Oppo Blu-Ray players are nice, but they are also consumer products where the warranty specifically limits coverage to the "original consumer purchaser" and "noncommercial" use, which is why I have avoided using them in non-residential applications.

[Chris15]

What I'm seeing now is small collaborative spaces - rooms designed for group meetings of up to ~6 students.
40 odd inch LCD on the wall with a Bluray, PC and a DTV STB and flyleads for VGA and HDMI.
Control is by a Crestron MPC M25.

This is the application I see front panel controls being really nice...