Lonely Hearts All three ways are documented on a single page

Lonely Hearts

All three ways are documented on a single page. Sony would be better off separating the instructions on different pages, and emphasizing the ability of the player to update itself. We have one XP box in a house full of Macs. We downloaded and ran it. It did not update the firmware. It produced one file, At this point we had an ISO on the XP box. Instructions on the website say to use your DVD burning software to create a DVD from the ISO image. The XP machine has no burning software. Unlike Apple, Microsoft doesn t include any. In my particular case, it so happens my Mac s DVD burner is broken from watching too many movies! On a hunch, I copied the ISO to my NetBSD machine and burned a CD a CD! using cdrecord. To Sony s credit, the player accepted the CD and updated the firmware without incident. Having upgraded, we registered. That involved registering the device with Sony and separately, using another code with Netflix. Registration was done with a computer on the Web. It wasn t painless, but worked without error. Once registered, no further action was required to make the player work. The whole process was needlessly complex. Windows wasn t really needed at all; I had to run Windows just to extract the ISO image file. In fact, my XP machine couldn t download the file with either IE or the FTP command line client because my firewall blocks active FTP. I had to use a Mac to download the EXE, then run it on the PC to extract the ISO. Other reviews here say the firmware update was a snap. I certainly wouldn t describe it that way. Maybe an upgrade starting with more recent firmware versions is simpler. Logically there s no need for Windows or FTP or Zip or burning software or writeable media. Sony should make the zipped ISO image available by HTTP, and provide free Windows media-burning software on the same page. Or perhaps enable updating from USB, which more people know how to use. The Sony lives up to all the reviews I read about it. Have not tried the netflex streaming yet. I selected this Blu-Ray player specifically to stream Netflix.