|
|
This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
|
|
Author
|
Topic: What is wrong with my Blue Ray player (s)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
|
posted 02-13-2012 05:46 AM
Claude - to be fair, a lot of modern consumer electronics products do need their firmware updated regularly, and I don't think it's completely unreasonable for Panasonic to expect the customers of their BD players to do this (or at least, accept that if they don't, they will encounter an increasing list of discs they can't play). I recently went through this saga with my Blackberry mobile phone (when I switched phone companies but kept the same handset, the new phone company needed the phone to have a newer version of the software in it), and the process took half a day out of my life, all told (including a bizarre phone conversation with someone in a Mumbai call centre who had a thick Indian accent but insisted that his name was Dave and that he was a Manchester United supporter!).
The advantage of this is that manufacturers can add new software functionality and iron out bugs without you having to buy a whole new machine, but the downside is that you have to faff about updating the software every now and again.
My fiancee had this problem with her BD player (sorry Brad, but it's a Sony!) about a year ago - it wouldn't play whatever was the latest thing she got from Netflix. So I bought her a 30-foot ethernet cable. We managed to tuck most of it out of sight behind furniture, and connect the thing permanently to her router. Every so often the player announces that it needs to update, does so, reboots and off it goes again. If you can stand it, my advice would be to do something similar.
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
|
posted 03-01-2012 02:16 PM
The Blu-ray disc format has a few "catch 22" situations, with the firmware topic being one of the biggest.
I'd much rather have the capability of updating a player's firmware than not due to the potential of bugs.
Most DVD players had firmware that users could not update. If the player had problems the only solutions were to live with the problem, send it off for expensive repair or replace it with a different player. I spent over $400 on my first DVD player, a Sony unit with built-in Dolby Digital decoding and 5.1 analog outputs. I got less than 2 years of life from the thing before replacing it with a Pioneer 5-disc DVD changer (that lasted about 5 years before the carousel started crapping out). During playback the Sony DVD player would sometimes develop a lip sync problem with certain discs and the problem would worsen until audio and video would just hang. Sometimes pausing the disc would clear up the problem. Other discs, particularly any Warner Bros. DVD, would play perfectly. The Sony DVD player locked up on the layer change of the Criterion version of The Rock; that's when I bought the Pioneer DVD as a replacement. I don't know for certain, but I think the problem with that Sony DVD player could have been solved with a firmware update.
I think the Blu-ray player manufacturers are trying at least a little to make it easy to update firmware on Blu-ray players that is as long as the player is connected to the Internet. Sony's Playstation 3 will tell you a firmware update is available (or required) during start-up. I'm guessing quite a few Blu-ray player owners don't have their machines hooked online and that can make a firmware update a much bigger challenge to users who aren't very computer literate. The PS3 is still simple to update using a computer and USB thumb drive; just get the folders and file names organized correctly. I had to burn some strangely formatted CD-R disc to update the firmware on a Panasonic Blu-ray player (despite the machine having a SD card slot). Not a user friendly procedure.
Software-based Blu-ray players on computers can be a chore to update. Often it involves downloading and re-installing the entire software player application than merely applying a patch to it. I've had to do that a couple of times already with the copy of PowerDVD on my notebook computer.
Some firmware updates solve bugs or add useful, new capabilities to a machine. Unfortunately, it seems most Blu-ray player updates are merely updates to the Blu-ray copy protection system that lately just gets cracked and cracked again. I have to wonder why Hollywood even bothers. Movies are targeted the most by pirates during their theatrical release. The demand is going to drop once the video is available to rent or buy and drop farther still as the retail disc becomes cheaper to buy. It's easier and faster for me to rent something from a video store than spend hours downloading it and trying to successfully burn it to a DVD or Blu-ray. Lately Internet Service Providers have been sticking users with bandwidth limits and throttling connections. Overall, the act of downloading a pirated Blu-ray movie is pretty impractical.
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
|
All times are Central (GMT -6:00)
|
This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
|
Powered by Infopop Corporation
UBB.classicTM
6.3.1.2
The Film-Tech Forums are designed for various members related to the cinema industry to express their opinions, viewpoints and testimonials on various products, services and events based upon speculation, personal knowledge and factual information through use, therefore all views represented here allow no liability upon the publishers of this web site and the owners of said views assume no liability for any ill will resulting from these postings. The posts made here are for educational as well as entertainment purposes and as such anyone viewing this portion of the website must accept these views as statements of the author of that opinion
and agrees to release the authors from any and all liability.
|
Home
Printer-friendly view of this topic