I only included burning discs in that rant for the times when the convoluted methods people choose involve buying hardware (for burning, playback or–strangely–both). I’m not even against Joey getting a good Blu-ray burner, he should, but he doesn’t sound like he knows what he wants. He sounds like he’s on the fence between burning discs, buying a Blu-ray player with a USB port (seemingly in addition to burning discs), and figuring out how to format a USB drive. He has said nothing I can remember about gifting copies of the DeEd to friends/family or having desire to make a display box for discs. The one concrete bit of information he does offer up is that he has plenty of extra HDMI inputs. I’d say he’s a good candidate for considering just hooking up a computer to his TV and being done with it, unless he does want to do some of those disc-specific uses you mention.

I don’t see how a Blu-ray player connected over HDMI to a TV is supposed to look dramatically different than a PC hooked up the exact same way, I think your calibration comment is moot in this instance.