Dedicated Media Player vs Blu-Ray Player?

[Major_A]

My brother in law's birthday is coming up and for a long time I've wanted to get them a media player (i.e. Patriot Box Office). However, with the recent purchase my parents made it has made me rethink the situation.
http://forums.legitreviews.com/about32473.html

Right now my sister and brother in law have a 46" LCD TV but 0 HD experience with it. I was thinking about killing two birds with one stone here. Get them a Samsung Blu-Ray player that has the same codec support as my parents TV. This would eliminate the need for a dedicated media player and they would have a Blu-Ray player on top of it.

The only thing is the Blu-Ray player is $150 and right now the Patriot Box Office is $65 after a $30 mail in rebate. What would you buy?

Samsung Blu Ray player
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6882676213

Patriot Box Office
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... x%20office


*EDIT*
Added Blu-Ray player's codec support from their manual.

[DragonFury]

which ever gives you the best support

[Sttm]

I'd go with the Blu Ray player. The added cost for being able to play Blu Ray discs seems worth it.

And if they really have not been watching HD on their TV I'd get them an imax movie on blu ray that would show off how amazing HD video can be. Like I love loading up the Imax shot parts of The Dark Knight to show off Blu Ray quality.

[skier]

depends if they are interested in netflix really, the difference being that with netflix they can have a lot more options of what to watch, at lower quality than blu rays, but netflix streaming is significantly cheaper

so figure out the feasability of internet access to the player, because I would never buy blu rays if I had netflix as an option

since they don't know 1080p quality as is, I would definitely get the patriot box for them

[Major_A]

The Blu-Ray player has Samsung Apps, Netflix, Blockbuster, Hulu, etc... I'm not going to spend the $70 Samsung wants for their dual band wireless N adapter. Really wouldn't matter much since they're rocking an older Wireless G router. I will however lend them a hand if they want to buy a cheap ethernet cable off of monoprice and run it.

The other thing is less than 2 miles from their house is a Redbox with Blu-Ray movies.

[skier]

in that case, blu ray it up

[Major_A]

After talking with my sister she wants a Blu-Ray player. So that solves that.

[Major_A]

Just an update on this.

Tuesday was his birthday and he got a Samsung BD-C5500 player. Ran a 100 foot CAT 6 patch from their router to the player, setup Netflix. So far it's played every movie file I threw at it and Netflix works great. I haven't set it up yet but Samsung has a sharing app where you can share folders on your PC with the player. Threw a 1080P MKV file at it and no issues reading from an external hard drive going into the USB port. I was kind of worried that the bitrate would be higher than the bandwidth of the USB 2.0 connection but it worked fine. Every AVI file I tried worked, so now when I go back over there I'm going to see how it handles a 1080P MP4 file. If that works then that covers 95% of the video content on the web these days. So far this thing seems like a much better purchase than a media player.

Hope this helps.