That is too funny!

I suspect I am accidentally doing something to cause this, but I can't figure out what!

I think you may need to clean your mouse/trackpad/trackball.

Okay, I have now tested every almost every aspect of this Blu-ray player except it's playback of, well, Blu-Ray discs. Because I don't have one yet. Because I can't access my mailbox, because my GF took our only mailbox key with her when she went out of town. Oops. She'll be back on Friday, and I'll experience Blu-Ray Iron Man and Tru Blood .

Until then, here's my final summary:

• Netflix playback is as good as the Roku player, exactly. As in, when I'm in the Netflix setting, I can't tell the difference. Both of them still have some aspect ratio issues, with lots of should-be-widescreen content only available in 4:3 and some cinemascope widescreen content coming across as full 16:9. But Netflix streaming is more for the convenience than the pretty anyway.

• Youtube is fine. You can search, it's well-organized with featured content. I haven't tried to log in to an account or anything, as I don't really do that stuff. The quality is, naturally, rather bad, though the HD stuff looks okay and it's nice to have the sound coming out good for things like "D*ck in a Box".

• Music playback over the network / off a USB key is mediocre. Folder browsing only, which isn't terrible, but it's not the fastest file browser in the world. Can't shuffle or do playlists. It'll work for me, as I only listen to full albums which are correctly folder-organized anyway, but I won't use it often.

• Picture viewing... hasn't been tried. Oops. I'll give it a spin at some point, but I honestly don't have that many pictures.

• Video playback over the network / off a USB key, as mentioned earlier, is amazing. It played every file I threw at it - mostly XviD AVIs and x264 mkvs. I didn't try anything fancy like iPod-encoded MP4s, so I may be missing some problems, but I'm fully satisfied. Did I mention it didn't need a DLNA server? It doesn't need a DLNA server! I was so happy.

• DVD up-scaling / playback is great. Definitely better than I was getting before - admittedly, I was using a PS2 for DVD playback. Even with my receiver doing up-scaling, I couldn't expect it to be good. THIS, however, is fantastic DVD playback. Quick to respond, great detailing, looks better than a DVD ever has on my TV.

Overall, I think it's one of the coolest almost-all-in-one devices I've used. I would love a Hulu setting for it, but I can always try to use PlayOn to stream it to the Blu-Ray player; I have to decide if it's worth the trouble / potential cost.

I think you may need to clean your mouse/trackpad/trackball.

That's the reason it was happening to me last week. Old mouse with a trackball when my newer mouse died. I couldn't figure it out because I hadn't had a trackball to clean in so long.

Gris,

can you link to the kind of player you bought?

Oh yeah!

It's an LG BD390.

I just checked pictures and the CinemaNow feature. Pictures are like music - you can do a slideshow for pictures in a folder, but nothing more sophisticated. And the CinemaNow looks pretty nice if you want to pay to rent a single movie - the quality on trailers is really nice at least, definitely better than DVD. I might use it if I ever MUST see a movie right then and can't wait for Netflix.

thanks! I wish it could play hulu though...

Right now nothing less than a full PC can play Hulu without the aid of something like PlayOn (a Windows DLNA server that transcodes and streams Hulu on the fly to any DLNA player, like this player, an Xbox 360, or a PS3). Hulu has been very reluctant to let set-top boxes have Hulu access for some reason, or I'm sure players would be all over it.

Hulu has been very reluctant to let set-top boxes have Hulu access for some reason

The reason is all of Hulu's investment partners are TV networks. They don't want to compete with their own broadcasts.

That makes some sense, but it's becoming increasingly easy to automatically download ahemmed TV shows using RSS feeds so that users like me can watch them on our set-top boxes soon after they air (usually within hours, and definitely by the next day). With no commercials. Or for that matter use a Tivo and still skip all the commercials. They'd be a lot better off letting me use Hulu.