Samsung Sued Over "Defective" Blu-ray Player 222
Anneka notes that, although both Netflix and Best Buy threw logs on HD DVD's funeral pyre today, things are not all going Blu-ray's way. A Connecticut man is suing Samsung, the maker that brought the first Blu-ray players to market, over its "defective" BD-P1200 player. The lawsuit seeks class-action status. The problem is that the Samsung BD-P1200 is a "Profile 1.0" player that can't play some Blu-ray discs and Samsung has no intention (or ability) to upgrade these players via firmware. Quoting Ars: "The meager requirements of the 1.0 profile mean that Blu-ray players which fail to implement the optional features won't be able to take advantage of picture-in-picture, which requires secondary decoders. 1.0 players are also unable to store local content, lacking the 256MB of storage mandated by the 1.1 profile. Profile 1.1 discs should still play on 1.0 players, however, but the extra features will not work."
BluRay vs BluRay - Not created equal (Score:4, Informative)
At the least, it's misleading advertising. The Profile 1.0 player being defective is a bit of a stretch, but it's not unfounded.
Re:I bet it gets thrown out (Score:5, Informative)
At issue are some significant title-compatibility problems with the player. In his complaint, plaintiff Bob McGovern says that a number of movies he purchased after buying his BD-P1200 wouldn't play on the device.
...
As one of our readers pointed out via e-mail, the P1200 has a checkered reputation when it comes to hardware reliability.
So it may not be as simple of an issue as "profile 1.0 can't use spiffy new 1.1 features". It may be more an issue of "Samsung rushed buggy new product to market and now won't support it."
Re:And the problem is? (Score:5, Informative)
He isn't expecting the extra features - he just wanted to have the discs play in the first place. According to the lawsuit, the player refuses to even read them.
The problem has nothing to do with Profile 1.1 - it's a flaw with BD+ [wired.com].
He got screwed over by DRM. I would have thought Slashdot would be more sympathetic to someone screwed over by DRM than to instead blame him for buying "too early" whereby "too early" is apparently six months ago.
Re:Defective CD Players (Score:5, Informative)
2) A DRM-crippled "CD" will not bear the Compact Disc logo, as it doesn't conform to the standard. It is a separate format that just happens to sometimes sort-of work in CD players.
Meanwhile, the movies mentioned in the article all come with a "blu-ray disc" logo on them, despite there being two distinctly different formats involved. That's misleading advertising, and I hope he wins his case. You can't create a so-called standard and then say "whoops, need to change a few things here, sucks to be you if you were an early adopter!" I understand that the bleeding edge sometimes cuts, but that's usually a result of bugs in the players or the manufacturing process, not because some idiot changed the specs of the format!
Re:I bet it gets thrown out (Score:5, Informative)
Samsung needs to figure out what the hell is wrong with their firmware and correct it so that it'll actually play movies, and they need to be more transparent about what's going on. They rarely acknowledge issues, and never document what fixes are in new firmware revisions as they're released. Perhaps they could give some test units to the shops that are authoring Blu-Ray discs, or, you know, get an advance copy of the disc so that firmware can be ready on the day the movie hits the streets. Follow this thread [avsforum.com] at AVSForum for more info.
DVD-Video != DVD-ROM (Score:3, Informative)
Fact Check (Score:3, Informative)
Re:There's a reason... (Score:3, Informative)
You mention networking gear. It doesn't really hold up here. When people bought "pre-N" gear , and "draft-N" gear , they knew what they were getting themselves into. These blu-ray players were sold as blu-ray players. Meaning they would play all future blu-ray movies. Funny I have an old RCA dvd player that plays new dvds, yeah I guess I am expecting to much for it to not randomly reject blu-ray discs.
Look they sold this as a blu-ray player , one should expect it to play every blu-ray disc, be it new or old as long as the disc is in good condition. These things are flaking out on people and not playing some discs , blocking features ( which I admit is really the problem I hate. ) That and the fact that they are now adding more features while increasing the core of the device itself , meaning they are changing specs mid stream. Something that HD DVD knew would happen and put the specs out to combat , they wanted one set standard , it seems like the blu-ray standard is not a standard and an ever evolving mess.
Re:I bet it gets thrown out (Score:3, Informative)
I've probably got the same Toshiba DVD player as you, and have found a fix for burned disks. Basically you need to change the "BitSetting" feild in your DVD burner so that the disks get marked as "DVD-ROM" instead of "DVD-R" or "DVD-R/W". This has fixed nearly all of my issues.
There's several different bitsetting programs around depending upon the drive manufactuerer - try google.
Re:There's a reason... (Score:3, Informative)
Ummm...Even the summary, which is usually wrong in most cases, points out that it will play Blu-ray disks but lacks some of the special features found only in players that support the new standard. What this guy is bitching about is two different things. First, the fact that he can't upgrade (via a flash ROM or something) to the new standard. What he fails to understand is the new standard also requires different configurations of hardware that his player doesn't have (there's a reason it is called a NEW standard). This is the bogus part of the suit.
Second, he is bitching about the BD-P1200 in particular which does have a reputation for being a crap player even with the old specification and Samsung's refusal to address that issue. This is what that part of the suit boils down to:
That is the angle he needs to play up. Samsung's willingness to make a quick buck at consumer expense in compatibility. If it can be proved that Samsung did this with full knowledge that they weren't going to support the player after the 2.0 spec release, WITHOUT informing the customer about it, then willful fraud comes to my IANAL mind.
Re:There's a reason... (Score:4, Informative)
In the end, we'll probably see Sony screw it up in another way to make his older player break completely, but that's a different story. BD+ will probably be on the receiving end of a lot of curses...
Re:There's a reason... (Score:2, Informative)
Its not like the manufacturers didn't know this was coming.....That was one of the problems with Blu-Ray, it was rushed to market to compete with HD-DVD (and for the PS3) and they hadn't finalized the standards...
Don't forget we still have BD Live compatible players to come (Profile 2.0), which will mandate an Ethernet connection and more local storage (1GB) for downloadable content.
Re:There's a reason... (Score:4, Informative)
This is false, according to all the information I've read. The movies will play. But the "extra" features will lack capability.
As for Blu-ray's reputed "more" space, show me a dual layer disk.
Half of all current Blu-Ray movies are dual-layer. The first was "Click" a year and a half ago. Hitachi has a 4-layer Blu-ray disc they claim play in current players, and TDK has prototyped an 8-layer Blu-ray disc.
As to the codecs, HD DVD supports more advanced codecs.
It's true that some of the sound codecs are optional on Blu-ray players but mandatory on HD DVD players. That being said, on Blu-ray they are required to have substantially higher throughput if supported. For video, they both support exactly the same codecs (MPEG2, MPEG4/AAC, and VC-1). In addition, Blu-Ray requires the player support almost 50% more throughput-- that, combined with the higher capacity, means that Blu-ray discs can be compressed less and therefore have much higher quality audio and video. That's why a side-by-side comparison of the two almost universally favors Blu-ray on all the AV sites.
Blu-ray is largely old technology with a new specification that makes them incompatible with everything else out there.
To be fair, that more accurately describes HD DVD. That's why HD DVD players are easier to produce.