I received my Sony BDP-S480 yesterday and have been playing with it for few hours now.
The setup
Blu Ray player connected to Onkyo HT-RC360 via HDMI and connected to Ethernet, TV Samsung LN52B630
As soon as I started the player it started my TV, onkyo receiver was off at this stage and running in pass-through mode. The completed the easy setup and player was ready within few 2-3 mins.
I started playing with YouTube and everything I searched was running fine, I liked the part that it was running all the videos that were listed as part of search. I was able to move forward/backward with ease and the load time was normal.
Second I started Netflix and started playing with the menu, I am used to Netflix app on Wii and the Sony interface looked a bit dated. It shows only 3 titles for a category at a time and you have to click on more to see whole screen of titles. I played some SD and HD videos and most of them started within few seconds. The HD videos took little longer as the player was checking bandwidth before playing every movie. Once the movies started it was streaming without any issues. The picture quality was really good, a lot better than watching through Wii.
Next I tested my NAS device (Synology DS207). The player listed my device as a service just like Netflix or YouTube and identified shared folders listing music, photo and movies, I played some random files that includes avi, dvd rips and hd video copies, it played all of them without any issues. So far I have been using Popcorn hour A100 for this purpose and now the blu ray player will replace it.
Since I am Amazon prime member I get those prime videos for free. The choice is very limited but I guess the content will keep increasing over time. Only issue with Amazon instant video is main screen shows movies/tv that can be purchased with one click and only need a pin number. If your kids know that pin number they can easily purchase any movie.
I tried all these things through Onkyo receiver and everything ran the same was as pass through setup. The player was on for almost 6 hours and didn't show any heating issues or stuttering.
I will be playing with some blu rays next and will update the review. So far I am extremely happy with the selection. I was trying to select between Samsung C6500, Sony S580, but this choice seems better so far.
The bad so far is no HDMI cable included, but that seems to be standard with all players now.
Update I
I tried two BD movies, Kings Speech and Rango. The player was quick in loading both movies. Since Sony has removed 1 GB storage that used to be standard on older models, you get message that can not connect with BD live content. I will try next adding external storate and test it. The blue ray quality was excellent and scene selection, moving forward/backward seems to work perfectly fine.
Update II 9/30/2011
I have been using Iphone app for this player and it's a time saver. Now once I have started the player I end up using this app instead of remote. I can use all remote function via app without worrying about facing the player. Plus the app allows me to search with full keyboard (iphone touch kepad) instead of time comsuming numeric pad. Netflix, Youtube, Amazon VOD, all have search capabilities and the app has made it lot easier to search.
Cons
So far I am annoyed with the youtube app. It can search fine but does not return all records returned by search on a computer. I tried using my account and it listed all the playlists I had, but it listed only few videos from the playlist. I updated my playlists from computer but the player app is not showing me updated playlist videos.
I found few type of AVI files the player won't play. It plays mkv, most of avi, mpegav files fine.
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