Customer Reviews

Memorex Blu Ray Player

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

I have had this player for a week. I was skeptical about the brand but when I popped in my first blu-ray disc and saw HD in unsurpassed clarity, all of my fears dissolved... that is until I rented a new release blu-ray disc and was greeted with a red screen informing me that the disc could not be played on my blu-ray player without a firmware upgrade. I call Memorex and they explain that the blu-ray disc association has changed the formatting of the new disc and all blu-ray players would require a firmware upgrade to play such discs. This player is profile 1.1 and the CS rep dubbed the new format 1.2 (which I cannot find any reference to anywhere else). The rep assured me that a firmware update would be made available by the end of the week but that promise went unfufilled and a email to Memorex prompted a "we have no update currently available" response. So there you have it! Who knows when/if Memorex will provide the necessary update? I bought this anticipating seeing The Dark Knight in full HD but now I will be shocked if this will even be able to play the disc. Thanks for releasing a product that became obsolete after one week with no plans to update the firmware, Memorex! I can't wait to never buy one of your products again!

P.S. Why would the Blu-Ray Disc Association change the format of discs faster than the manufacturers of the players can keep up? Why would you produce a product that can't be consumed?

I bought the Memorex based on price and the reviews of others. It performed perfectly right out of the box. I haven't even attempted a software "update", since it has played every movie I've given it so far without a hitch. Only negative is the seemingly long star-up time (compared to my old DVD), but this may not be unusual for Blu Ray...especially a low-cost machine. Hooked up the HDMI output to my SONY 1080p and got a great picture. Set-up was fast and easy.

I received this player for Christmas. I hooked up the player and turned it on..& the Memorex logo pop up...and then nothing. A blank blue screen. I hit the open button, and the tray got hung up on something. Afer playing with the tray, I finally got it to open. I put in a BR Disc. Still no video signal just a blank blue screen. Couldn't access the set up menus and the movie wouldn't play. Defective player. I called Memorex 3 times, and waited on hold over FOUR HOURS total before finally speaking with someone. Memorex agreed the player was defective, and asked for a check for $7.50 so they could send me a new player upon receipt of the defective player. Before packaging the player, I marked the underside with a small bit of chalk. It cost me $18 to ship the player back to them...so I'm out $25.50 in shipping alone. Five weeks later, I receive a package from Memorex. I open it to find it's the exact same defective player that I sent to them, with the same chalk marking on the bottom of it. It wasn't repaired and had the same issues as when I sent it to them five weeks earlier. I finally gave up after calling them back three times and waiting on hold almost three hours. A total of seven hours of on hold time and still a defective player to show for it. With customer service like this, it's a miracle that Memorex is still in business, and should be ashamed of how they treat their customers.

I got this Blu-ray player for x-mas and it works great. I assume that mine shipped with the firmware update already installed.

I have played a dozen or so blu-ray movies & regular DVD's on it already without any problems at all. One movie skipped and caused me to restart it, but upon further inspection of the disc (regular DVD) it had a pretty deep scratch on it.

This would be a 5 star product except that it is slow to load, and slow to eject. Standing there hunched over, waiting for the tray to open / close is annoying... so I just hit the eject button, walk over the the kitchen, grab a drink, and when I come back the tray is finally open. I can live with that.

*** UPDATE 01-31-2009 ***
As it turns out, I DO need to install the firmware update. Initially all of my BD movies worked fine, but I was proven wrong when I got the new X-Files movie in from Netflix (my mistake). I downloaded the firmware update, burned it to a CD-R as vaguely described in their manual, and loaded the firmware from the player's settings menu. After several attempts at this, including the system freezing up, several different CD-R burns, and hours of frustration... It STILL does not work. I emailed tech support 3 days ago and have yet to get a reply. Oh, and because this unit is sooooo slow, it really has taken me over 5 hours of waiting and waiting for the player to attempt to load the updates. I will call on monday, and if I don't get the issue resolved I will find a way to return it.

Aside from the general headaches of the Blu-Ray systems, such as slooow starts... this is the worst player I have ever seen. I have had mine for a couple years(?). I have had to install 2 updates. I'm currently on update Sept09 (today is 9/2/2010). Today I could not play "Date Night". I checked for a new update.... nothing. The update instructions were atrocious. I had to try at least three times and took over an hour for the first update. You should hear the noise it makes now.... loud! Memorex released this inferior product and does not support it. Never again. There are enough other Brands that I never have to buy another Memorex product. Memorex MVBD2510 BR player.

Update 1/29/2011 - I double checked. It's been 2 years of misery. It still plays 95% of the BR discs. Still very loud. It hasn't died yet. So freaking slow.
No new updates since Sept 2009. The model 2510 is considered a discontinued model. It is getting more and more difficult to find the support page. Try:
[...]

I just received my player yesterday and have already watched a Blu ray disc and an upscaled disc. I have an older HDTV so I'm running component. Be aware that if you want any type of HD connection you will need to buy wires. The ones that come with this are only for SDTV. That being said it looks great on my 1080i tv.

I also have expereinced a problem like one of the reviewers stated. I watched iron man with no problems however when I tried to watch the latest futurama movie I receive a message stating I need to do an upgrade. I will call memorex tomorrow but it sounds like they dont have one yet.

Had this player been able to update over the internet it would have gotten a 5 star rating however with some BD not even able to play without a patch from the manufacture it makes it very inconveient.

User beware, you get what you pay for. Its great for the price but some BD may not play unless memorex sends out a patch.

When this was shipped to my house, I only had a regular definition DVD at home to try and was amazed at how great it looked. The upconversion works well! Just to be sure I tried the DVD on on my old player and did not look nearly as sharp.

I love the fact that I can put AVI files on a Flash Drive and play them via the USB port in the front. Now I don't have to waste hours burning DVD's!

Blu-Ray DVD's look great and load fast but when you start up the unit, you have to wait about 30 seconds for it to 'load' even if the slot is empty.



UPDATE 12/27/08:
Everything was working fine. Then I updated the 'MVBD2510C Firmware update Dec 24 08 (firmware)' and now when I put in a blu ray disk in it says 'Unknown Disk.' I've tried five disks. Regular DVD's play fine. I've tried 'Reset Settings.'

UPDATE 1/9/09
I returned this lemon and bought a PS3/80 for $399. Quite a bit more, I know but it's an amazing system with wi-fi firmware updates, downloadable movies and games and I can even connect to my computer to show movies and pictures. The USB port allows me to show movies and pictures from a flash drive!

I've had this player for about four months, it works just fine but isn't perfect. If you want all the bells and whistles get a Sony blu-ray player and pay the extra $100 to $200.

If you just want a basic blu-ray player to watch movies and don't care about extras this player will do.
In comparison with the Sony blu-ray player that I have on the TV in my bedroom it is very slow. When you turn it on it takes a minute or two trying to load a disc and then it tells you that there is no disk. Once you load the disk it takes a minute or two to read the disk.

Updating the firmware is a chore. If you need to do this you can find it on the memorex website. Make sure that you download the firmware for the correct model. If you have a MAC you might not be able to do this, I tried to do it on my MAC and it didn't work. I had to do it on my PC.

Once you've downloaded the firmware you've got to unzip the file. Burn the contents of the folder to a CD-R (not CD-RW). Don't burn the entire folder to the CD-R, just the files inside of it or the player won't recognize it as a firmware disk.

If you do this you should be able to play even the newest blu-ray disks. I've noticed a lot of reviews that complain about this player not playing all blu ray disks and I believe that it's because the firmware hasn't been updated. That was the case for me.

Depending on what you paid for this blu-ray player, this blu-ray player may or may not be worth it. I bought this player back in December of 08 for $140, which is very cheap for a brand new blu-ray player. Initially I really didn't expect much from this player due to its budget price. However I was extremely surprised at the amount of features that came with the player.

The player can decode Dolby TrueHD and has bitstream support for DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD. This is on par with the more expensive blu-ray players by Samsung and Sony. Additionally, the player has 5.1 analog outs, which may be useful to those who want to enjoy uncompressed audio but may not have an AV receiver capable of sending audio over HDMI.

There is one additonal feature that one-ups the higher end brands and that is its ability to play divx, wmv, and xvid video files on a cd/dvd or a usb flash drive. Although this feature is not very useful to me because I already have and Xbox 360 that can stream these files, I would imagine alot of other people that don't have a streaming device may find it useful. The only one drawback to this feature is the inability to FF and RW.

The load times for this player is also on par with the other higher end palyers. It takes about 10 seconds to load a dvd and 20 seconds to load a blu-ray. The startup time for turning on the blu-ray player is about 30 seconds. So 50 seconds total isn't horrible for a blu-ray player.

After a couple of months of use I was very pleased with this player as Memorex had released a firmware update back in December that allowed the player to play a majority of new releases. Then April rolled around and suddenly alot of new releases weren't able to play. I'd say the success rate was around 60%. A majority of the blu-rays that didn't play came from Fox. Although I don't blame Memorex for the ridiculously useless and annoying copy protection scheme that studios are utilizing, I still think it is within their obligation to promptly release a firmware update. I think releasing a update once every 2 months isn't asking for much, but it's been nearly 6 months and Memorex still has not release a new FW update. If Memorex continues to abandon support for this product, all it's doing is alienating it's customers and leaving a bad taste in their mouths. These customers will likely never buy a Memorex product again no matter how much of a bargain price it is.

Memorex may have made a very nice blu-ray player where it's features and performance are comparable to the more expensive players released by Samsung and Sony, however, Memorex's lack of support for the product makes it very difficult for me to recommend this product to anyone. If it's been six months since the last FW update, then I doubt they will ever release one. The list of movies not being able to play will only grow and make this player obsolete.

I picked this up for less than 150 when they first came out. It works well, although it has required several software updates which is not a seamless process. The software updates are mostly a result of the blu-ray disc manufacturers coming out with a new flavor of copy protection each week.

The unit is slow. Slow to boot, slow to load, slow to respond to the open command. Still, it works as it should. Currently, after 3 software updates, it seems to play everything I throw at it. Picture quality is excellent.

The software updates will require downloading files and burning a disc via your PC. One thing the instructions are not clear about is to make sure disc tray door is open when you start update process on this DVD player. I do not know why it matters but unless you want lots of messages about wrong disc format, just do it.

If you think Blu-ray is actually going to be around for a while, you might be better off with a Panasonic or other unit that can do live updates via the internet. If like myself, you think your bluray player will eventually join your betamax, laserdisc, and Voom satellite, then this is not a bad way to get in at a low price for a format that may be obsolete in 2 years.

If you can not get it on sale then it may not be worth it. Definitely not the unit for grandma or any technophobe.