Sometimes there's more to an object than appears on the surface. Take LG's BD-590 for example. On the surface, it looks like a standard-issue Blu-ray player. So far, so good: the device plays Blu-ray Discs and DVDs. But it also has a 250GB hard drive and wireless networking, allowing it to function as a music server, photo viewer and YouTube client, among other things. For a retail price of $400, that's quite a package.

Of course, additional functionality means additional complexity. Are these enhanced features easy to use? Do they work reliably? Do they detract in any way with the product's basic purpose: playing Blu-ray and DVD movies?

I tested the BD-590 in my home theatre, in the family room on the lower level of my three-storey suburban townhouse; my wireless router lives on the upper level. I connected it via HDMI to a Pioneer Elite SC-27 A/V receiver, which is connected via HDMI to a Panasonic Viera TC-P50V10 50-inch plasma.

The Player: The BD-590 is an attractive component. The disc drawer is on the left; and on the right are transport controls and a USB port. These are all hidden behind a flip-down panel, which provides a sleek look. In the middle is an LED alphanumeric display, plus a cluster of red and blue LEDs that show disc and network activity.

The supplied remote has large well-labeled keys that are logically arranged. However, the four main cursor keys are awkwardly shaped; I found it easy to miss them when I was trying to navigate around onscreen meuns. The remote is not backlit.

When you turn on the player, the open menu shows six main options: Movie, Photo, Music, Home Link (for streaming content from a PC on your home network), Netcast (for viewing online content), and Setup. The three content options (Movie, Photo, Music) have submenus where you specify the media with the content you want to play: disc, USB or the device's built-in hard drive. The menus are easy to understand, although the English in some dialog boxes betrays its Asian origins.

Setup: The BD-590 has an Ethernet jack on the rear panel, but also has built-in Wi-Fi wireless networking. To connect the player to my home network and the Internet, I used the wireless option.

The setup process is quite logical. In the Network section of the Setup menu, you specify what connection type (Wired/Wireless) you want to use. The following screens let you choose the wireless network you want to connect to, after which you enter your network password by picking letters out from an onscreen keyboard using the remote control. After that, the player connects to your home network whenever you turn it on.

Movies: As a Blu-ray player, the BD-590 is very capable and quite speedy. The main menu appears 18 seconds after you turn on the player. The calibration Blu-ray Disc that we use for our TV tests, DVE HD Basics, loaded in 23 seconds. You can expect any current Blu-ray player to deliver stunning pictures and sound when playing a Blu-ray Disc, and the BD-590 definitely delivers. Played on the BD-590, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland on Blu-ray looked magnificent, with superb detail and wonderful depth and colour.

Where Blu-ray players can vary is how good they look with standard DVDs. On the BD-590, Alice on DVD didn't look as good as on Blu-ray; not only was there less detail, the image looked flatter - exactly as you'd expect. But it certainly was a good picture, with no bothersome artifacts. For movie playback, the BD-590 delivers exactly what you'd expect from a mainstream Blu-ray player.

Movie-lovers who are interested in 3D content (like Alice, when a 3D version on Blu-ray becomes available) should note that the BD-590 is not 3D-compatible.

Music: What makes this product special is its capabilities as a music server. When you load a CD into the player, it downloads album, artist and track information from the Gracenote online database and displays it on your TV screen, complete with album art (on most discs). That process takes a mere second or so. If you select the Menu option while playing the CD, one option is CD Archiving. In the next screen, you can select which tracks you want to rip, or just rip them all. Click the Option button, and you'll be given a choice of bitrates: you can use lossless encoding if you're not concerned with eating up disc space, or use MP3 encoding at 128, 192 or 320kbps. Encoding at 192kbps, it takes about 23 seconds to rip a four-minute song while the music plays. The process is very easy.

There are other ways besides CD to get music onto the BD-590's hard drive. When you connect a USB drive to the USB port on the front, you can play music files on the drive. One of the choices when you select the Menu option is to copy files to the BD-590's built-in hard drive. Before copying, you can specify a destination folder for the music files, and create a new folder if you like.

The BD-590 lets you play music from PCs on your home network, and copy music files. The process is similar to copying files from USB. iPod owners should be aware that the BD-590 will play MP3 and WMA files, but does not support the AAC digital-audio format, which is the default format for iPod and iTunes. If you want to play AAC files, you'll have to transcode them to some other format (MP3, WMA) first. There is a lot of software that can do this, but the new files will eat up disc space on your computer's hard drive, and will probably not sound as good as the original files.

Playing music that you've recorded onto the BD-590's hard drive is dead simple. From the Home Menu, select Music, and then choose the HDD option to play music from the player's hard drive. In the next screen, you can view your library by Song, Genre, Artist, Album or Playlist. It's easy to navigate to the music you want using your remote. It's as easy as using an MP3 player, or music software like iTunes or Windows Media Player.

You can switch from the Library mode, as LG calls it, to Directory mode if you want to view the contents of the BD-590's hard drive as folders and files. I think most users will find the Library mode friendlier, but the Directory mode allows you to copy files and folders to a USB drive, which is very useful for backing up your content library. You can select the files you want to copy, or just copy everything; and also choose whether to copy all files (photos and videos as well as music) or just music files.

Photos and Video: The BD-590 will also display digital photos and videos on your HDTV. You can connect a USB drive containing image files to the player's USB input, or use its networking functions to stream photos and videos from a PC on your home network.

The BD-590 was able to play some, but not all, of the photos and videos that I loaded onto a USB thumb drive. It successfully displayed digital photos that I had taken with Canon Digital Rebel and EOS 30D digital SLRs; but would not display JPEGs shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 Micro Four Thirds camera. This is a strange problem, which occurred with two different players on files on two different thumb drives. I have no explanation for it.

I also ran into difficulties playing videos I shot with a Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG20 Dual Camera. The BD-590 would play 960x540-pixel MP4 files I shot with the camera, but not 640x480-pixel (VGA) QuickTime MOV files.

The lesson here: if photo and video playback are important to you, it's a good idea to bring a thumb drive containing your own files to the store, so that you can ensure compatibility with your own content.

Other than these compatibility hiccups, I liked the way the photo and video features worked on the player. It did a beautiful job of displaying my digital photos on the big 50-inch high-definition screen.

Networking: The BD-590 lets you stream content to your home theatre from the Internet and from DLNA (Digital Living Network Allinace) devices on your home network.

Choose Netcast in the Home menu, and you'll be taken to a colourful screen showing options for YouTube, Picassa and AccuWeather. In the YouTube viewer, you can select featured videos, or search for the content you want by clicking an onscreen virtual keyboard using the remote. It's a little fiddly, but works well. YouTube HD videos streamed very well over my home wireless network. They looked great in a small window in the BD-590's YouTube client, and also fine when displayed full-screen. Note though that these 1280x720-pixel videos won't fill the while screen of a 1080p (1920x1080-pixel) flat panel.

Hopefully more Netcast features will be added soon. The U.S. model supports Netflix online movie rental, Pandora Internet radio and Vudu online video. Those services aren't yet available in Canada; but when they arrive here (Netflix is expected soon), hopefully a firmware update would allow the BD-590 to support them.

Choose Home Link, and you'll see a screen listing devices (‘servers") on your home network, with content that you can stream to the BD-590. I checked this feature with two different computers: a Toshiba Satellite E200 running Windows 7 and an Apple MacBook Pro running OS x 10.6.

Windows 7 PCs are DLNA-compliant out of the box, and should be able to stream content to DLNA clients like the LG BD-590. As soon as I had connected the Toshiba notebook to my home network, it showed up in the list of servers in the BD-590's Home Link menu. If this doesn't happen, you can click Stream in the menu bar of Windows Media Player, and select "Automatically allow devices to play my media." Or choose Network and Internet in Windows 7's Control Panel, then in the Network and Sharing Centre, choose Homegroup and Sharing Options, and make sure the box for streaming pictures, music and video is checked.

Mac OS X is a bit trickier, because it's not DLNA-certified. But there are third-party programs that add DLNA server capabilities to the Mac. I downloaded a trial version of TwonkyMedia Server from www.twonyvision.de and installed it on my Mac. After that, the Mac showed up in the BD-590's list of servers.

In the following screens, the folders on the screen will mirror the way media content is organized on your computer(s). When I selected the Toshiba notebook, the next screen showed folders for Music, Video, Pictures and Playlists. When I selected Music, I saw icons for All Music, Genre, All Artists, Contributing Artists, Composers, Albums, Rating and Music Playlists.

When I selected TwonkyMedia on my Mac, my initial choices were Music, Photos and Video; and when I selected music, my choices were Album, All Tracks, Artist, Artist Index, Artist/Album, Composer, Folder, Genre/Album, Genre/Artist, Genre/Song, Personal Rating and Playlists.

As noted in the Music section above, the BD-590 doesn't support playback of AAC-encoded files; but other than that, I had no problems streaming music over my home network from the Mac and Toshiba notebooks.

I ran into one issue with photos. Pictures streamed from my Mac looked very fuzzy; but from the Toshiba notebook they were crystal-clear. At first I thought this Mac problem has to do with the way TwonkyMedia Server is streaming photos, rather than being a problem with the BD-590. But I had no problem viewing photos from the Mac on another DLNA-compliant home-theatre product (a new Toshiba LCD TV, review coming soon), so I think the problem lies at least partly with the LG BD-590.

The Bottom Line: If some of the BD-590's networking features sound a little rough around the edges, don't blame the player. Unfortunately, that's the nature of the beast. This stuff is getting a lot easier to use; but except for networking nerds, it's still not exactly user-friendly.

But the BD-590 is a very good Blu-ray and DVD player. And its music-server capabilities are powerful and wonderfully easy to use. It's a ground-breaking combination. If you have a new flat-panel HDTV, but yet haven't splurged on a Blu-ray player, and also have shelves full of CDs looking for a digital home, you'll find lots to like about the LG BD-590.

Article Tags:  LG, Blu-ray, BD-590, iTunes, AAC, WMA, MP3, music server, YouTube, NetCast, DLNA