The upgrade pain is the sole reason I haven’t bought a Blu-Ray player. My parents have a Sony BDP-300 player. When we were visiting over Thanksgiving, they had gotten ‘21’ on Netflix. It took us three days to be able to watch that freaking movie. The upgrade requires you to burn an update disc, put it in the player, and let it do it’s thing. Easy, right?
DAY ONE:
I went to the Sony site, downloaded the .iso onto my Dad’s PC, and bookmarked the instruction sheet. It was several pages long, and every few paragraphs were bold faced notes in red text, warning me that if I didn’t follow the process exactly, I’d brick the player. Dad went to the store to buy blank CD’s.
Turned out he’d never burned a CD on that particular machine, and didn’t have a CD burning program installed. I sent an email to the store, and got a recommendation for a freeware disc burning package the next morning.
DAY TWO:
Installed the burning software on my Dad’s PC, and saw that we had CD-RW’s. Sony claims it had to be a CD-R, not a CD-RW, or the player could be corrupted. Back to the store that afternoon. Buy more discs, burn the upgrade disc that night.
DAY THREE:
Pop the newly burned disc in the player. Sony’s instructions warned the upgrade would likely take more than half an hour, and during the process, the player would reboot several times, open and close the tray a couple of times, and sometimes I should expect it to just sit there for a few minutes. Under no circumstances was I to do anything until the front panel said “DL OK”. I was especially not to unplug the player, or turn it on or off. Failure to heed this warning would result in a non-functioning player that would need factory repair.
So I put in the disc, and let it start the process while we had dinner. Came back an hour later, and the player appeared to be turned off. So I called Sony. After the normal delays and intelligence tests, I got to an agent. After some time, he told me it was likely the upgrade was complete, and the player had turned itself off after two minutes to save power. Apparently the revised instructions will advise the user to closely watch the player during the 30 minute upgrade process. Under his guidance, I turned the player back on, and confirmed the firmware version. Popped in the new movie (Remember the movie? We’re doing this to watch a movie), and confirmed it would play. By that time, it was 9:00, so we decided to watch the movie the next night.
DAY FOUR:
To be fair, the movie looked gorgeous. But in the back of my mind, I kept thinking about how much work it had taken to get there. And I knew that in a few months, a new Blu-Ray encryption key would require another upgrade, this time performed by my father with my advice over the phone.
So let me ask you: Is this acceptable behavior from an appliance? Would you tolerate a toaster that required a software upgrade the first time you brought home melba toast?
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve got a home network with multiple TiVo’s, an Apple TV, and multiple computers and consoles. I’m happy to twiddle with all of that, and am proud to have set up my universal remote exactly the way I want it. And I’m just old enough to be amazed by the clarity of HD content. But I feel that my DVD player should be able to play a DVD, twiddle free.
I understand that the BDP-350 has built in networking capability, and is apparently perfectly capable of getting its own updates, thankyouverymuch. So maybe there’s hope. But do ask about the upgrades.