Large Screen TVs with built-in DVD/BluRay?

[Arlin]

Are there any LARGE (42"+) format flat panel TVs with built-in DVD/BluRay players?
I can find smaller TVs (19"-32") with this feature, but larger ones seem to not exist.

We have a few locations that regularly use DVD (Some Sunday school rooms) that currently use a roll-around cart with a TV & DVD player.
We would like to permanently mount a Flatscreen TV to the wall, but they also require a DVD/BluRay player.
We would prefer to NOT have a protruding shelf just for the DVD player & all the cables that also go with it.
So, I was looking for some larger format TVs with a built-in player. But they seem to not exist.

[petereit]

We used to have those combo units in our nurseries. We eventually trashed every one of them after their DVD players stopped working.

We now have an AppleTV mounted to the back of all our HDTVs and keep all our videos on a central server (an old repurposed Mac Pro G4 I bought used for $150 and threw four new 2TB hard drives in.) The video streams wirelessly from the server and works awesome! No more walking from nursery to nursery asking "Does anybody know where the Larry Boy and the Angry Eyebrows DVD is? I have the case, but no DVD!"

[dmot]

Originally Posted by petereit

We used to have those combo units in our nurseries. We eventually trashed every one of them after their DVD players stopped working.

We now have an AppleTV mounted to the back of all our HDTVs and keep all our videos on a central server (an old repurposed Mac Pro G4 I bought used for $150 and threw four new 2TB hard drives in.) The video streams wirelessly from the server and works awesome! No more walking from nursery to nursery asking "Does anybody know where the Larry Boy and the Angry Eyebrows DVD is? I have the case, but no DVD!"

Mark, a lot of DVDs do not allow you to put a copy on a hard drive due to copyright restrictions even if you own the DVD and keep the original locked up in a cabinet. That's why it was a big deal that worship software had DVD play capabilities in case they weren't allowed to rip the file they wanted to play. So how do you get around this? Is there another license for this or do you just limit the DVDs you rip to ones that give you permission?

[Arlin]

The AppleTV idea is a good one.
But, besides the copyright issues dmot mentions, we would STILL need disc playback ability.
Our usage is too ad-hoc for that. It would be a nightmare to require people to first rip the video and save it to our server.

Is there an AppleTV version with a DVD/BluRay drive?
That would provide the best of both worlds. DVD/BluRay for ease of use & convenience. Plus 'smart' TV for when we want to show a YouTube video or similar....

[petereit]

Originally Posted by dmot

Mark, a lot of DVDs do not allow you to put a copy on a hard drive due to copyright restrictions even if you own the DVD and keep the original locked up in a cabinet. That's why it was a big deal that worship software had DVD play capabilities in case they weren't allowed to rip the file they wanted to play. So how do you get around this? Is there another license for this or do you just limit the DVDs you rip to ones that give you permission?

We haven't run into that issue. We seek permission from all license holders beforehand. We haven't received any objections and I haven't encountered any DVDs that I couldn't transfer.

[Gracetech]

Our setup has the players mounted to the wall just behind the display so that the face of the player is just around the edge of the display. It looks clean and neat. The only real problem is that the remote only works on the player side of the display.

We also mount our game stations the same way.

crt