LG BD590 Blu-Ray Player Uncovered [LG's Latest Blu-Ray Player First With Onboard Hard Drive, Also Has VUDU, WiFi Connectivity]

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LG has shown off a bright new Blu-Ray player that is the world’s first to come with its own hard drive built into the box. Unfortunately – it’s not for ‘backing up’ your Blu-Ray movies to a hard drive. Instead, it’s for storing music and other media files so you can make the Blu-Ray player the centerpiece in your media setup.

It will rip CDs directly to the hard drive, and movies and photos can be transfered to the device via USB or Ethernet. Unfortunately, LG added 802.11n WiFi connectivity, but you can’t wirelessly add files to the hard drive. As you can imagine, once the files are on there, you can play them anytime.

LG can’t feature DVD and Blu-Ray ripping for obvious reasons, but as some blogs have reported, breaking Blu-Ray encryption would require full-on cracking anyway, and the file sizes of Blu-Ray files would quickly fill up LG’s 250GB hard drive they’ve included on the BD590.

The other features all have been previously seen on other LG Blu-Ray players. It features MusicID by Gracenote that will let users identify a song – any song, from any piece of media being playing on it. LG’s NetCast internet function will let users buy and download movies from online service VUDU. The nice thing about the BD590 is that the movies can be directly downloaded to the internal hard drive. The BD590 will also be compliant with all DLNA standards.

No comments about pricing yet, before the device’s planned Spring/Summer 2010 release. Oddly enough, the Sony PlayStation 3 has a Blu-Ray player and an internal hard drive, and has been around for 3 years, but I guess LG’s marketing department doesn’t count that.