Panasonic voice support on Blu-Ray players?

In order to use IP control of my Panasonic DP-UB820, the instructions tell me to turn on voice control and register for the service with Panasonic. I tried, and it looks like this “feature” was discontinued in October 2023 and there is currently no way to register for it.

Does anyone know how I can enable IP control without going through this step?

We don't have an untouched test unit so I can't be sure what you're seeing. The test unit we have was enabled for that feature and we performed it years ago. Once you do it, that's it. The player really doesn't ever need Panasonic central to do anything further.

Have you tried just skipping that step? It might work on the latest firmware given they eliminated the other path.

In the event a fresh unit no longer allows this, the good news is that there is a path. The bad news is that the technical skill required to flash firmware on a player may be beyond some users. On the Internet, you will find widely available firmware improvements for these players which now support all the models and the latest firmware.

One of those changes eliminates this whole issue. Roomie's latest release provides a switch in the Advanced panel of the Devices editor for the Panasonic BD players to turn off Panasonic Authentication in the event you have applied such firmware changes. Not only is the whole voice control registration nonsense eliminated, but control of the player is faster because the pointless auth round trip is eliminated. Note that beyond noting the existence of such things, discussion of how to apply or where to get such things should be avoided here as it's not the right forum for that and it's very easy to find on other well known forums.

I would also note that voice control is still heavily advertised by Panasonic, so I feel like this thread may not have the correct information on that topic.

https://amzn.to/3w2p4z8

Here is the announcement from Panasonic:

https://help.na.panasonic.com/answers/termination-notice-voice-control-operation-will-end-for-select-models-dp-ub9000-dp-ub820-dp-ub420-june-13-2023/

Clearly translated from the original Japanese and full of swiss cheese holes to read in circles. Reminds me of trying to get information from people at the Panasonic booth every year at CES, just as definitive. I interpret almost nothing from that since we couldn't care less about either voice feature technically. See my post above, recommendation is the same. By 6 months later, you would also think they'd stop advertising that feature in the literal title of the product if it were to be interpreted as such.

Now that I have power back on, I tried to get it to work. No dice. Turned off the Panasonic authentication, but still cannot control it. The web site to set up voice control is dead, and I can’t find any information online regarding firmware updates outside of the official Panasonic info. Sounds like I’m dead in the water.

The new switch in Roomie to turn off Panasonic Authentication is not just something you flip in Roomie and you're done. You need to update your player to use that. This thread is an example of where one would find information on doing that:

https://www.avforums.com/threads/lets-try-again-to-put-the-free-in-regionfreedom.2441584/