Pioneer BDR-203

[backuphajek]

I am not sure about the performance of the BDR-203 blu-ray writer as the one I received is defective. It doesn't write to blu-ray media. But I have to say I am definitely not too impressed with Pioneer.

I contacted Pioneer for assistance and explained to them the problems I was having. This is how it went.

Pioneer told me to contact the manufacturer of the blu-ray burning software to make sure it's not the software that has issues with their writer. Nothing like making the customer do troubleshooting for them. I am using Power2Go that shipped with the Blu-ray writer. Nothing on the software manufacturer website about issues with pioneer drives - I didn't expect any. A few forums suggested updating the firmware on the blu-ray drive. The problem was the firmware was nowhere to be found. I contacted Pioneer again and asked them where I find the firmware update. They e-mailed me a link to the firmware on their website. The link was broken and did not get me to the firmware. I called Pioneer again. The person on the phone acted like I was an idiot and told me the firmware definitely is on their website. I pressed them and asked them to talk me through it and help me find it on their website. The person transferred me to another department that supposedly was in charge of guiding inexperienced users like me to the firmware. Of course, the person I got transferred to said I got transferred to the wrong department but to his credit tried to help me nevertheless. After a few minutes on hold he got back on the line and told me to check their website again in a couple of days because he can't find the firmware either but that he informed their engineering department of the missing firmware asking them to repost it.

Two days later the firmware showed up on their website. I downloaded it, however there were absolutely no instructions on how to install the firmware in the package. I unzipped it and ran the executable. It installed another executable and a firmware image on my hard drive. I tried running the executable by clicking on it in windows explorer. A command prompt window would pop up and instantly disappear. I tried dragging the image file over the executable and got the message Failed to load binary file. I tried running the executable with the image file name appended after it from command prompt but got a generic error without an error number. I contacted Pioneer again. I was told most likely the files got corrupted during my download and that I should try to download it again. The person on the other line looked like he was ready to hang up so I stalled a little bit in order to keep him on the line long enough to download the file all over again and try the udpate while he was still on the phone. I stalled by telling him that it seems strange I could actually end up with a corrupted zip file and not have the zip extractor catch it during unzipping. These sorts of things typically have check sums that are checked during decompression to make sure the files are not corrupted. He thought about it and said that is true but sometimes mysterious things happen. By then I managed to download, unzip, and run the installer again. When I ran the updater the same error popped up. I told him I just re-downloaded the file and ran it and the same thing happens. He said he'll contact the engineering department and that I should check back in a couple of days on their website again.

So here I am waiting again. In the meantime their blu-ray writers are out of stock so I can't get an advance exchange until more arrive into stock.

There are a number of things wrong with this experience all pointing to the Mickey Mouse operation Pioneer is running. I have worked in software, firmware and hardware development for the past 19 years from engineer all the way to director of engineering. I've seen and probably caused myself beginner mistakes. One of these is posting firmware updates without proper verification of its operation. All Pioneer had to do is try to install the firmware on one of their drives to see they are posting a corrupted image. This kind of a beginner mistake is inexcusable in a professional company that ships thousands of products. Another thing. Posting firmware updates without instructions on how to install it is again Mickey Mouse. It's as if they had some high school dropout managing their engineering operation. Additionally, an installer that posts an error always needs to post an error number. Informing the user that an "Unknown Error" occurred goes back to writing software in high school.