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I purchased a Sony Blu-Ray DVD player. It has a LAN cable port in the back. I would like to access the features that are available on said player. Can I do this by hooking a LAN cable from my laptop, which has a strong wireless card, to the player to be able to access said features (Pandora, Hulu, Netflix), or am I barking up the wrong tree. Thanks.

Chuck

Unless your laptop can work as modem you are barking up the wrong tree.
Best bet is a cat 5 cable to your router or if run is too long relocate router closer to the player.

The LAN port on the player is the same sort of port as the one on your laptop, therefore as has already been said, connecting the port on your laptop to the player won't work. The port on your player and on your laptop are NIC (network interface card) ports. As such they provide access to a network, but the network infrastructure is also required in the form of an "ethernet" switch, hub, or router with a built in hub. All but the least expensive Sony players have Wi-Fi in addition to a LAN/Ethernet port, and that would be the most convenient way to connect to it.

Lew wrote:All but the least expensive Sony players have Wi-Fi in addition to a LAN/Ethernet port, and that would be the most convenient way to connect to it.

That will teach me to be cheap. Thanks for your help.

Chuck"who can live without the extras instead of paying extra money for an extraneous modem and router that would just add extra headaches"Jackson

I can't say for sure it would be worth anything, but I'm pretty sure you can indeed make a working Ethernet connection between these two devices.

You don't need a hub for only two hosts. You might need a router or something to assign IP addresses to the hosts (cf. DHCP), but you can assign an IP address manually on the laptop, and you may be able to do so also on the player, or the laptop might be willing to act as a DHCP server. That might be the head-scratcher, there, as I don't think either of those two scenarios are very likely.

It likely would take a special cable, same plugs and wires as common "cat-5" but with a "cross-over" wiring, for connecting two computers.

(I should add, I know nothing about DVD players and have no idea what a Blu-Ray is.)