Samsung Sued Over "Defective" Blu-ray Player

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."

Comments

Re:I bet it gets thrown out

[Draknor]

Just to clarify, according to TFA some movies won't play:

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

It will play Profile 1.1 discs - you can still see the video and hear the audio. Except it doesn't, and Samsung refuses to provide an update to fix this - which is why the guy is suing.

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+.

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

[MWoody]

1) Recordable compact discs have their own logo and are considered a different, but analogous, media format. A player that will play compact discs, with no mention of recordable or rewritable versions in the packaging, doesn't have to play anything.

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

[Sethb]

I have one of these players, and we're not upset about Profile 1.1 vs 1.0, we're upset that it's a total crapshoot whether or not a given movie will play on your player. I got mine in September, this isn't a device that's three years old, either, but it has been plagued with bugs. I rented Weeds from Netflix, and the disc would play fine ONCE, but not a second time (confirmed with others on AVSForum). Rise of the Silver Surfer didn't work for a month or two after release. Deja Vu would constantly hang during playback. Pirates of the Carribean 3 didn't work until last week, nor did Little Miss Sunshine. 3:10 to Yuma still doesn't work, and last week I sat down to watch Across the Universe to find that you're left at the menu screen, but with no cursor to start the movie, and you can't even skip to a chapter or work-around the issue.

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 at AVSForum for more info.