Problems with Firmare updates and playback.

[mderemick]

Hello everyone! Before I go on a rant please understand that I am not here to be a fanboy or anything like that, but after having blu ray for over a year now I honestly believe that the technology wasn't ready for consumers.

I really miss my old DVD player. I have had nothing but problems with Blu-Ray since I got my Sharp BD21U along with a new TV about a year and a half ago.

Movies often freeze up on the machine, either causing the machine to stop and re-play the movie from the beginning or it will slowly try to play through the 'bad section' of the disc without audio and in super slo-mo. Af first this really wasn't much of an issue, but recently it's been happening more and more.

At one point, a few months ago, I tried watching Quantum of Solace, which made me do a firmware upgrade on the player. No problem, I've done quite a few firmware upgrades before, this should be a snap. Sure enough the firmware got stuck (at 90%, bricked the machine totally) and I had to fight for weeks with Sharp to get my player fixed. This episode left me with a bad taste in my mouth, but then things got even worse. Since the 'fix' its been almost impossible to watch a movie without it skipping and freezing on 90% of the movies I try to watch.

I check the discs all the time, no scratches - sometimes there will be a fingerprint but even after buffing them out the discs still often freeze up on me. It got to the point that I really thought it was my BD player, so this weekend I went out and bought a PS3 slim.

OK, I hooked it up and played games on it all day (which I like it a lot). Last night my wife wanted to watch Iron Man, and not even 15 minutes into the movie the PS3 froze up completely, to the point that I had to unplug it to reset it (holding power didnt work, controller would not connect, etc).

I tried the disc in both machines with the same result (at least my sharp BD player didn't lock up requiring me to pull the plug on it, but it would stop and restart the movie constantly. It happened in like 6 different parts of the movie, which really takes you out of it.

I've looked online for quite a while and see that skipping and freezing is a pretty common problem. It seems to me that Blu-Ray needed a lot more testing before it was released.

As it is now, it's a totally unreliable way to watch a movie, and I'm seriously considering selling my BD player, my BD movies, cancelling Netflix's Blu Ray service and going back to my tried and true DVD player - sure it won't look as good as BD but honestly I'm tired of missing parts of movies. I know I'll get flamed for this: but I think HD-DVD was a better format at least in terms of reliability. I never had problems with my DVD or HD-DVD players - not even once. Hell, DVD's will play just fine after a lot of abuse, why not BD?

Is it the laser? Maybe it's too fine and sensitive to the smallest dust?

I'm sure im not the only one who wants to riot over this...

Does anyone else feel cheated?

Was anyone able to fix these problems with a disc cleaner or buffer?