If it doesn’t get its act together, Blu-ray could be toast

If washing machines and toasters worked like some Blu-ray players, there’s a good chance we’d all be wearing dirty clothes and eating our turkey club sandwiches on white bread.

I’ve got a second-generation, Samsung BD-P1200 Blu-ray player that every few months refuses to play most of the discs the studios want me to review. When that happens, if I’m lucky I can download some software from the manufacturer’s website, use it to update the player’s firmware, and hopefully get the movies to play.

The process isn’t difficult, but it’s time consuming… and, frankly, a pain in the ass.

It’s also usually several months between updates (six months passed between the last two). Care to guess how many BD releases I couldn’t watch during that time?

Although the firmware updates usually solve the compatibility problems, sometimes they don’t.

And even when they do, I know it probably won’t be long before I start getting more titles for review that simply won’t play until the folks at Samsung—who otherwise make some fantastic products—release another firmware update.

I’ll pause here to grab a tuna-on-toast sandwich.

Wait, the toaster apparently doesn’t like my Wonder Bread. I wonder if I should check the maker’s website to see if there’s a heating-element update. Or maybe I’ll run out to grocery store and grab a loaf of Stroehmann’s to see if it’s compatible with the toaster. Nah, I’ll just slap some peanut butter on crackers.

Where were we? Oh, yeah, my Blu-ray frustration. Maybe I wouldn’t be so frustrated if it didn’t take like 3 hours to load a disc even when there are no compatibility issues. I’m exaggerating. It only seems like 3 hours. I’ve never really timed it, but I’d bet that it takes at least 2 or 3 minutes before I see a disc menu or, more likely, the first of 17 trailers for other titles.

During that time, the player displays a couple of different screens of animated circles—one looks like a B&W clock without minute hands, the other has two lines of converging colored polka dots—that I’m convinced is some sort of Morse code for my other components that translates to: “Let’s see how long this jackass will watch these screens before he gets bored enough to go to the fridge and grab a soda.”

Sometimes I think the Egyptians took less time to build the pyramids than it takes my player to load a movie. But if I’m lucky, the Morse code eventually ends and the movie—or the trailers—begin. But there have been times when the movie—or trailers—never began. The thing is, with Blu-ray you just never know which it’s going to be. It’s kind of like playing a slot machine that uses discs instead of coins.

But I think the odds of winning at slots may be higher than getting a Blu-ray disc to work on my player.

In fairness, I do have one Blu-ray player that successfully plays movies every time. It’s called a PlayStation 3. But I suspect the reason it has so far been compatible with every disc I’ve fed it is because it seems to want to update its software every single time I turn it on.

That’s generally a 15 to 30-minute procedure, but at least it has its own built-in WiFi and is smart enough to know when updates are available and where to find them without my help. And it loads discs in a fraction of the time it takes my Samsung to load them—only around two or three times longer than it takes a $30 DVD player to load a disc.

I’ve been told to that there are some standalone Blu-ray players that are compatible with just about everything and load movies quickly. I hope that’s true because based on the titles I’ve actually been able to play, Blu-ray is awesome—there’s nothing that looks or sounds better—when it works.

If there’s a manufacturer’s rep out there reading this who believes they have such a player, feel free to prove it to me. Send me the player and I’ll give it a spin and report back to our readers about compatibility and load times.

But until I’ve experienced the kind of flawless performance with Blu-ray that I’ve had for years with DVDs, my opinion is that it’s not quite ready for prime time. And I’m not the only one. After a neighbor who was considering buying a Blu-ray player for Christmas watched on three different occasions as I tried and failed to play new releases, she said, “I don’t think this Blu-ray thing is all it’s cracked up to be.” I tried convincing her how great it is when it works, but I don’t think she was listening because she was in the kitchen with my wife admiring our new toaster.