Yeah, it's a difficult piece to sell to a client. But, I suppose you could throw the customer a bone on that one, if it fits the customer. I've gained customers confidence by doing things very similar to that, plus, you really make your money on your labor to integrate anyway right?

Yea I hear you. The only difficult thing might be service. That is the one thing I like about the Sony ES players is their 5 year warranty.

This reply seems to be extremely late, but I ran into the same issue with a Sharp BD-HP70U. The solution I found, was to use a \r for command return instead of 0D in hex as the manual specifies. I am not using a line feed either. I know that the 0D in hex should be the same as a \r command return, but for some reason the Sharp players doen't seem to like it. My best guess is that the players prefer ASCII over HEX. I'm using a Crestron control system, so my commands are POWR1 \r for power on and POWR0 \r for off. Note the spaces after the last used parameter are important. Once I started using this (instead of what the manual says - 0Dh0Ah) everything started working beautifully.