PANASONIC DMR-UBT1 UHD Blu-ray player
UHD Blu-ray player, PVR, Blu-ray recorder — Panasonic takes its combo concept to new levels.
While the idea of combining two or more functions into one box can be attractive — it can save space, reduce the number of required inputs, diminish complexity — there is often a downside of less than optimal performance compared to separate devices specialising in the individual functions. So would it be wise to buy the combo device? Of course the answer is: it depends.
It depends on how well the combination unit performs the component functions.
Which brings us to the Panasonic DMR-UBT1 Ultra-HD Blu-ray player and HDD recorder. This combines five functions: TV receiver, personal video recorder. UHD Blu-ray player, network media player, and network media server. Of those five, it is at least as good in two of those functions as any standalone device, and pretty damned good on the others as well.
Equipment
The DMR-UBT1 is a component-sized box with an attractive mirrored front and a slimline aspect, standing only 68mm tall. The front panel, black and sleek, with bevelled edges, is hinged to fold down, allowing access to the disc tray and an SD card slot and USB socket on the front.
Inside, in addition to the disc spinner, is a 2TB hard-disk drive for recording digital TV transmissions. I won’t work out the hundreds of hours worth that you can record. Let me just say that if 2TB is becoming a problem in terms of insufficient space, even that won’t be your main problem. That will be sorting and working out which of hundreds of programs you want to choose from.
As is Panasonic’s habit, you can record DTV in native original format as it’s broadcast, or in some other lower bit-rate format, extending the effective capacity of the hard disk even more. ‘HM mode’ allows, according to the specifications, some 1370 hours of content.
This is also a UHD Blu-ray disc player. It supports all the standard UHD Blu-ray features, although not Dolby Vision. It has one rather than two HDMI outputs, so it’ll work best either connected directly to a modern TV, or to a modern AV receiver compatible with UHD video signal standards. If necessary, though, you can get sound from the coaxial digital output.
There’s an additional USB port on the back, along with Ethernet. The unit can play video and other media (including photos) from storage plugged into the front and back USB ports, and from SD cards using the slot at the front. Dual-band Wi-Fi (to 802.11n) is also built in.
Apart from antenna input and passthrough, that’s about it for connectivity. There are no analogue connections of any kind.
A standard Panasonic IR remote is provided. In addition, power and eject soft-touch buttons are on the top right of the unit.
Performance
Now, we’ve covered Panasonic PVRs, recorders and disc players many times over the years. So starting it up was like déjà vu 30 times over, as the same basic grey-on-grey set-up screens appeared, with bright yellow selections.
Straightforward and clear, if somewhat dated. The wizard takes you from the selection of your State (for time-zone purposes) straight through to tuning in digital TV stations. That only took a couple of minutes. Then there’s a 4K TV compatibility check and the option for having ‘quick start’ on, which of course has the unit wake up and get going faster, and also means you can switch it on using your smartphone app, and leaves the clock running in standby.
Network connection followed. I opted for Wi-Fi and it presented a list of available Wi-Fi access points, including 5GHz ones thanks to the dual-band function. As is current best practice, I use the same SSID on all my main Wi-Fi access points, including both frequency bands. That assists the multitude of portable wireless devices to switch to the most useful one more easily. This unit presented both access points’ names, but didn’t indicate which band each employed... until after I’d chosen one, used the virtual keyboard to enter the password and the player had connected. Only then did it indicate that the 2.4GHz connection had been chosen, offering the belated suggestion that ‘For better performance of Home Network function, it is recommended using a wireless access point compatible with 802.11n (5GHz).’ Thanks for that. I went back and set it up again, choosing the other access point.
At this point you can decide whether you want what the unit calls the network functions switched on. These are DLNA server and renderer functions. I chose yes, but you can of course leave them off and switch them on later through the set-up menu.
The player does not check for a firmware update straight away. But it has auto check switched on, and is set to check and update at 3am. I did a manual check through the set-up menu and there was a 1.05 firmware available (the unit came with 1.03). It took a little more than five minutes to download, and a few minutes more for the unit to install it.
Picture
As has been the case for many years, the special sauce used by Panasonic somehow manages to make free-to-air digital TV look cleaner, sharper and more real than most PVRs. Especially now that there’s a reasonable amount of true full-HD content available. DVDs were always decoded perfectly, and generally subjected to an very good automatic progressive-scan conversion. Changing output resolution requires drilling down into the set-up menus quite a long way, so it’s something you’re unlikely to undertake on a regular basis. It’s probably best just to set the output to 2160p.
It was quite the pleasure to watch UHD Blu-rays discs on this player. Detail was excellent. HDR handling was flawless. What particularly delighted me was the first Harry Potter movie, shot on — remember that stuff? — actual film. It seemed that what I was seeing (on a high quality OLED panel) was... the film. With its little imperfections, with its small amount of grain, and with its fluidity, the way it pings one’s subconscious as the thing we’ve experienced at the heights of cinema itself.
Recording
The recorder did a fine job on recording, too. It has padding before and after (not quite long enough after) the recorded program to make sure everything is captured. You can set the usual kinds of repeats, and have recordings made by key words, along with series recording.
It may, perhaps, now be getting passé, but the ability to archive to recordable DVD or Blu-ray means that if there is something important to you, you can keep it for long after this particular device is no longer on your equipment rack. Note, also, you can edit out advertisements and such before archiving.
Smart stuff
There’s a bit of Jekyll and Hyde in the approach this player takes to network media. Let’s start with the good stuff — so good it makes me want to ignore the rest and recommend this unit almost entirely on the basis of it alone. And that is its abilities as a digital media renderer. They are not perfect, but not far off.
A digital media renderer is a DLNA device that you can send media to using a separate digital media controller. That last is an app, typically on an Android device. I use BubbleUPnP as a controller. I dialled up photos on my server and sent them to the DMR-UBT1, and they were displayed with immaculate precision, scaled down to 4K without any intermediary bottlenecking to a lower resolution, nor any loss of colour resolution. This device will present your photos to your UltraHD TV with the best possible quality.
It did almost as well for videos. I sent it a bunch of 1080p MPEG2 videos I recorded from HDTV a decade ago. All worked perfectly. I sent it some very recent H.265-encoded video. Again perfect. What it didn’t like was video files encoded with either Dolby Vision or, more troublingly, with 10-bit HDR. That said, lots of other devices have difficulty with such files as well.
One of the reasons I went for Wi-Fi connection rather than Ethernet was that the latter was, according to the specifications, a 100Mbps connection, rather than a gigabit one. That makes Wi-Fi, potentially at least, faster. With the 5GHz Wi-Fi connection to what is one of the best consumer Wi-Fi routers presently on the market, there were no problems streaming a 100Mbps UHD video file to the unit. It played with perfect quality and no interruption.
Finally, music. As I write this paragraph, the Panasonic DMR-UBT1 is playing a 5.6MHz Direct Stream Digital track (aka DSD128), albeit having converted it to 88.2kHz PCM (presumably at 24 bits) before feeding it out via HDMI to the home theatre receiver. It doesn’t perform such shenanigans with PCM, happily accepting 24-bit/192kHz FLAC files and forwarding the matching PCM through to the playing device.
As a DLNA server, something you will probably rarely use, the Panasonic DMR-UBT1 also serves brilliantly. I was able to dial up recordings on the player as though they were on my NAS and play them on any of my other network players.
Using Panasonic’s TV Anytime, it was possible to watch recordings even remotely on a portable device, albeit at much lower resolution than full HD. I suspect it would work even better, and perhaps at higher resolution, for those with a faster internet connection. This would seem to be a nice-to-have, maybe usein-an-emergency type of feature, rather than something one would regularly use.
Which brings us to the mediocre interface used for the various streaming services. This has been around in Panasonic players and recorders for many years. It works. I brought up Netflix and watched a show or two. But it is slow and clunky. Any smart TV is better.
Conclusion
The Panasonic DMR-UBT1 UHD Blu-ray player/HDD recorder is — apart from lack of support for Dolby Vision — as good a DVD, Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray player as there is. And produces the best free-to-air TV picture available. It’s also a fine recorder with a huge capacity and archiving abilities — even to recordable Blu-ray — and a very solid digital media renderer. This is one combo device that shows when an all-in-one solution can be well worth it. Stephen Dawson