Glad to finally be a member of this forum, and hope that you can help me out with a bizarre problem that I can't find any reference to.

I've been the happy owner of a Panasonic DMP-BD35 since February and for most of that time it's done nothing to disappoint me. I have it connected to a Samsung 550 LCD via the HDMI it came with. In the past few weeks however I've experienced a VERY strange problem while watching films (dvds AND blu rays). It manifests in different ways according to what I'm watching, and it happens at random times during playback. The best I can describe it is a 'fluctuating framerate'.

The first time I noticed it was during A History of Violence on standard DVD. It was hard to notice at first but halfway through the movie I started getting distracted by an unnatural smoothness in the motion, almost like the film itself was shot on HD rather than 35mm. It resembles a weaker version of Auto Motion Plus, which is odd since my TV has no such function. This had never happened before with any other disc since I bought the TV and player in February, and it wasn't happening during the first half of the movie.

The next disc I watched was Dead Man on DVD. It plays fine for the first 30 minutes and then decides to 'speed-up' the framerate every few seconds so that I get a wierd alternating framerate wherein it'll look fine and then turn into 'Keystone Cops' for 3 seconds and then go back to fine again. This cycle repeats every 10 seconds or so. This particular problem hasn't shown up during other movies, but I suspect the root of it is tied to the same issue I had with A History of Violence. I later played the disc in my MacBook and it played perfectly.

During Watchmen on blu-ray I notice that every now and then I'll get the same 'smoothness' that distracted me during History of Violence, although it's less frequent. Every movie I've played since then has had a similar problem though, especially Oldboy on standard DVD. One scene will look like AMP, then go back to normal. I tried it with The Fall blu ray last night and chose a scene at random. The first scene I watched had a bad 'hi-def video' look to the motion, as per the problem at hand, but after a minute or two it returned to normal, and stayed normal for subsequent scenes. After going back to the first scene I watched, it looked normal again.

Since I can't even put a name to what is happening I'm having trouble finding a solution. At this point I'm not even sure it's the player. No settings have been changed on my player or tv. Still using the same cables and connections. The only thing that's changed in the past weeks is that I moved to a nearby condo. The tv is a little higher up than it used to be since we got a new table for it.

Since we have a terrible router I have not done any firmware updates. While my player can output at 24p, my TV is unable to do so to the best of my knowledge.

I did have one problem back in March. The Venture Bros. season 3 blu ray had some horrible interlacing issues throughout all the episodes, like the de-interlacing was outright failing. Other than that, everything looked perfect on my machine until now.

Is it possible that it's all in my head? Are my eyes just suddenly attuning to the cons of 3:2 pulldown?

Thanks in advance for any tips or ideas. I'm going a little nuts.

You'd probably be better off going here:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...sonic+dmp+bd35

Well, you should probably try a firmware upgrade, although I doubt it has anything to do with your problem. You can do them without plugging the player into the network by downloading the upgrade and making a disc, although mine (BD55) when first plugged in was asking to upgrade firmware by the time my TV warmed up. It probably isn't that hard.

If I'm understanding you, I've seen similar things most often on poor HD broadcasts. (well, they don't have to be HD) Where the bandwidth has been lowered and the picture suffers. It shouldn't be bandwidth in a BDp, but similar effects could come if it is having a read error. It wouldn't surprise me at all that a computer can read a disc better than a standalone player, but it could simply be dirty discs, too. My Mac is the only machine that can even read my Gladiator disc anymore, had to archive it on there just to be able to ever watch it again.

I get a lot of problems on Netflix discs like this. Usually much worse, where a scratch or crack sends the machine hunting and pixellating.

BTW, what does the audio do at these times?