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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."
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.
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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."
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.
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!