Samsung Blu-ray players reportedly have stopped working...

Thanks I should qualify I love Sony TVs. Have never really used them for components. For Blu Ray I have use Cambridge Audio or Xbox One. No issues with either of them to date. Both are great players imo.

 

I had my Samsung tv’s professionally calibrated and they do achieve proper color.

 

Mrs Qwerty bought a $70 noise-cancelling headphones. They were about a month old, when the headphones exploded, almost embedding broken headphone plastic in the opposite wall. Fortunately she was not wearing them because the noise of the explosion would have caused hearing damage. She contacted Sony for warranty support (as required by Australian consumer law), and they gave her the runaround, claiming - can you believe it - that she "left the new batteries in (a 1-month old device) in for too long". The AA batteries were a leading brand, nowhere near expiry date. Whenever she would contact them they wasted literally hours of her time on the phone, giving her the runaround - as a ploy not to honour their legal obligation to repair/replace under warranty. This runaround went on for several months, until I told her to tell them that I was going to ask on local and international audio and a/v forums about how long batteries should be left in Sony headphones. Within 10 mins they rang back, telling her that "the technicians had looked at her headphones and decided after all that they could be replaced"! Amazing what can be achieved in 10 mins after being given the run-around for months. Replacement headphones arrived, and after 6 weeks of minimal use (she was afraid to use them), they stopped working.

I have always felt Sony equipment was well designed and manufactured, and had been a loyal customer for decades. However, after such poor quality was evident, and such utter contempt was given to their legal obligations and to loyal customers, I won't touch their equipment again. And I'm quite happy to share the story with whoever will listen. And I haven't even mentioned the Sony clock radio - top of the line - that we bought that had a design flaw that made it difficult to set the alarm. An alarm clock - it's not rocket science to design. So be vary wary of dealing with Sony.

And Sony need to know that United kills guitars. And learn.

 

Do the Samsung players allow the user to roll back the firmware? If so, perhaps an older revision could be downloaded and installed via USB for example. I've done this on some hardware over the years when an update either is buggy or alters some features I preferred pre-update.

 

Based on my past experience I have to agree although it has been a long time since I bought a Sony product.

Back in the 1980's and 90's I was a big fan of Sony products. My first CD player was a Sony, I then bought an expensive, at the time, Sony portable CD player, I had a Sony Trinitron TV and my buddy had a Sony CD player. Every one of those Sony products had some type of issue within 5 years of purchase that required repair or trashing the product and getting a competitor's product.

At the time trying to deal with the Sony warranty and repair was a nightmare. I will not buy a Sony product. Everyone has a different experience with a manufacturer but for me Sony is still on my no buy list.

Is Sony even a major player anymore in the electronics business and have they have lagged behind the other major players when it comes to state of the art audio/ video?

The only Samsung products I own are a refrigerator and tablet and both have worked flawlessly over the past 4-5 years, knock on wood.

 

A few Sony SACD players were known timebombs. Lasers quickly stopped reading DSD layers, The VCRs got very plastic in look and feel and then everything else eventually did too. They coasted on their Trinitron rep for decades because the old tvs were good.

 

What lists? What's your source for these claims?

Maybe it's true, I don't know, I'd just like to know the basis for these statements.

 

Seems to depend on the model. Upper tier Samsungs can achieve proper color volume with a calibration. However, I’ve read too many reviews of Samsung TVs where they couldn't achieve proper color even after a calibration.

 

too late.

 

it was shutting on and off (looping) BD tray was trying to load even without a BD disc! player turning on and off every few seconds......and the USB port was gone would not read any flash-drives.. I trashed it.

 

Around 2009/2010, I was really obsessed with researching HDTVs and Blu-ray players (before we eventually got a SONY TV and Blu-ray player* from HSN), and I remember Samsung's players always being horribly rated and having a lot of issues. It was odd, too, 'cause their TVs always rated towards the top. Anyway, I'm not shocked to hear this.

*Which still works and is my CD player, now. Replaced it, in the living room, with a newer SONY model. Never had any serious problems with them, just to counter the narrative against SONY in this thread.

 

Not in my case. I saw the measurements. My TV's are not upper tier. I think it depends on who is doing the calibrating and with what equipment.
Here are some example pics (not all of the steps) of the calibration.

 

And...

 

My Samsung Blueray player is working just fine.

 

Could it be a new attack from the Blu Meanies?

 

Done some further reading on this issue - this is not an issue with a new firmware. Players are using the same unimproved firmware they've been running since 2017.

This is something internal to the player, related to the time and date. There were Sony TVs that would brick after a certain number of power-on hours, but that didn't happen to everyone on the same day.

Can this be fixed by setting the time back a few years? Can you even get to the time settings before the player crashes, or control it yourself? Can you force fake time with NTP? Some players have stayed up long enough before booting that the firmware version can be screenshotted.

Likely there is something encrypted or requiring encryption in the layers of software, that includes a software security certificate with an expiration date. The players will run for a number of seconds before spontaneously rebooting, so it could be after several layers of software boot up, such as the software that checks for updates, attempts to bring up HDCP, or tries to log onto the smart player's "app store".

As the entire ecosystem of Blu-Ray and streaming content is built around keeping the DRM content in encrypted containers, it could be where one of the required re-encryption stages fails in the boot process, demanding a reboot instead of continuing.

Of course it could be sloppy programming that just crashes the whole system, unchecked date overflow, math that calculates a negative elapsed time, etc.

 

Whatever the problem is, I would expect that Samsung would be more responsive, regularly communicating with affected owners and servicepersons how they are working on a resolution to the problem.

 

Samsung stopped making bluray players about 3 years ago. Does anyone at Samsung still know the details about how their bluray players work at a detailed enough level to be able to quickly diagnose and fix what is wrong?

 

I doubt it.

 

This is different though. It's clearly (most likely) a firmware issue.

The issue seem to be acknowledged by Samsung and they will investigate further:

Solved: Blu-ray player power cycling whenever plugged in - Page 98 - Samsung Community - 1278935

Regards

 

What part of your link offers the "solved" solution?

 

I never said that. It was in the link itself. Sorry if it raised your hope.

I don't think there's a solution yet. Based on my skimming through the pages. It looks like they will 'look further into it'.

Edit: "Solved" was definitely on the page when I copied it. It must have been removed since.
Edit 2: Solved: Re: Blu-ray player power cycling whenever plugged ... - Page 119 - Samsung Community - 1278935


Regards

 

Looks like you have to contact support and they will send you a shipping label to send the unit in. They will fix it and return.

Mine is still ok, I see it’s currently not connected to the internet, so not getting updates.

 

I just checked the Samsung community forum. And yes, that is what users are reporting. You contact support and they send a shipping label to send it in to be fixed. Yikes! That's going to be expensive for Samsung. I was hopeful that Samsung would be able to figure out a way for technically inclined users to be able to fix this on their own. But that may not be the case. What a screwup by Samsung. This situation will become a lesson in what not to do when designing hardware with embedded software that could brick the hardware. The lesson being to make sure the software cannot brick the hardware if unexpected things happen. The lesson is to fail gracefully. Which is a lesson software engineers already know, but is something that is difficult to follow.

I'm still very curious about what the root cause of this is. I hope we find out. Call it morbid curiosity. We need to learn from this. Because the internet of things means this is going to happen to other gear and other companies.

 

I had a Samsung a good few years back and once calibrated it was a cracking set with a lovely picture.
But there's been a number of issues I believe with rogue Samsung software updates and I've found their phones to be a poor Android implementation with lots of attempts to keep you in Samsung's grasp. Wouldn't buy a Samsung product personally.