Wednesday, July 7, 2010

TV's, Remotes and Blu-Ray DVD players

What happens when you take your blu-ray DVD player with you on vacation and forget to bring the remote?

For one thing, you can't do a thing without it.

We have a www.netflix.com account and you can stream movies from your blu-ray DVD player if it has the Netflix connection. (I had written about this a while ago.)

But without the remote we could not watch a DVD or stream movies.

Since we subscribe to www.directv.com, we tried to program the DirectTV remote.  Hours went by without success.  Each code given was tried, failed and made us frustrated.

I called www.directv.com and was told that they have another remote, a newer version, which may work with our specific blu-ray player. Nothing was promised but we decided to get the newer remote.

We are expecting the new remote tomorrow.  Hopefully it will work.  I will let you know. 

As an aside, I would like to commend the customer service department at www.directv.com.  I had originally called about programming their remote and was not completely satisfied with the answer I had been given. I then sent an email stating my concerns.  I was called the next day and my problem was resolved.

In the meantime, while waiting for the remote to be shipped, we called Sony, the brand of blu-ray player we own.  They were not forthcoming at all. They would not give us a code to work with our remote.  They said that we would have to call the manufacturer of the remote to get a code.

How is that for customer service?  Why would this information be "classified?" Is it because they only want you to use Sony equipment?

Since this is the only blue-ray DVD player we own, I can't test the Directv remote to see if it would work with other brand blu-ray players.

Something to ask about when purchasing your next blu-ray player.  That is, if you want to reduce the number of remotes you can misplace each day.