Slashdot Mirror
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.
...
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."
Frankly, I wouldn't mind seeing these companies getting a slap on the wrist for a changing definition of what Blu-Ray is by changing the profile but not making the differences obvious (it's a little tiny box on the back of a case).
That said, sounds like the guy has a case to me. Read this part:
It was defective. It sounds like the bought a DVD player (let's pretend) that wouldn't play a good percentage of DVDs. Not "doesn't play every neat feature". Not "doesn't support 12.16 theatrical sound". Just plain "won't play". They could fix it with a software update, but they don't seem to want to.
That part is bait-and-switch. He bought a player that should play any good Blu-Ray movie (possibly san-extras). It won't play many of them. Either all those movies are defective, or the player is. If it is the player, he was ripped off. At the very least, they should have replaced his player with something that would play movies.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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!
...but that comes with being an early adopter.Why should it? If he bought something marked that it plays Blu-Ray it should play any media that is also marked Blu-Ray, regardless of when either was bought. Just because it was the first player to market doesn't make it exempt. If they change the spec they should change the marking to at least show that the two aren't compatible.
i read about it in a blog once
This lawsuit is not over that Profile 1.1 content will not play on this Profile 1.0 player. The Samsung in question has much worse compatibility problems--some discs don't play at all. Before the first Profile 1.1 discs came out, the Samsung refused to play BD+ discs such as Fantastic Four 2 and The Day After Tomorrow. It took Samsung something like a month to issue a firmware update to fix this issue (other manufacturers who had issues had updates out in a week or so). Furthermore, even after that update, new discs continue not to play. The problem mostly is limited to Java-enabled discs, which are in the Profile 1.0 specification.
We're not even talking about Profile 1.1 discs either. Some standard releases refuse to play, and Samsung's support has been sluggish. Problems with the PS3 and Panasonic players have been addressed within a week or two of problems occurring. There are a number of discs that have been out for months that still don't play, even with the latest firmware:
Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (12/3/07)
Blade Runner (12/18/07)
Pixar Shorts (11/6/07)
That's over a month and a half with no fix! The profile 1.1 discs (3:10 to Yuma and Sunshine) don't play the movie successfully. They sputter and freeze. This problem isn't observed on other Profile 1.0 players from Panasonic, Sony, and Pioneer. The Samsung player really is defective.
While I agree with you , I do feel for the folks who bought these players when they were $600 + , there is no reason that features should have been missing from the players when they came to market. HD-DVD doesn't have this problem , wonder why ?
These companies need to stop doing this. People need to stop accepting the planned obsolescence excuses and realize they are milking us. These players should not have "versions" or "profiles" make it a single deployment standard and stop trying to add features the competition already has. They should have added those in the beginning.
Im just getting tired of seeing folks who bought in early getting porked by companies like Sony and Microsoft. I understand software revisions. And I don't mind it, but why are vital things like a second decoder not in the spec to make it at least upgradeable. Or even just disabled until a special disc is put in to flash the firmware to activate it ? I am tired of us folks paying to be alpha and beta testers for the corporations.
This package Does Not Contain a Winner