Blu-Ray & the Sad-Face

Blu-Ray Blus

Tonight I have two BRD’s in my possession from Netflix. Can’t watch either one of them.

Yeah.

First choice was V for Vendetta. Popped it in, it started, then started “loading” for like 3 minutes before the movie began. Then, it begins. Then, my Sony BDP-S300 restarts. And it begins the loop. This was decidedly not fun.

Second choice for the night? BBC’s Planet Earth, Disc One. I had issues with this disc once before with it coming up with a “Wrong Region Code” error. Wanna take a guess at today’s fun? If you guessed “you had the same issue with it this time, too” then you get the prize (there is no prize, but pretend there is and act excited).

I never had any such issues with my DVD players. Ever. Not from day one. DVD, the guys who brought us HD-DVD. Why did I root against them? Damn I am thinking I backed the wrong horse here. Despite BRD’s technical superiority, I’m wishing for the reliability & interoperability I had with DVD. Dammit.



But wait! There’s hope on the horizon!
These BRD players from Sony have upgradeable firmwares. You go to Sony’s support website, download the firmware, burn it to disc, and load the disc into the player, and it does it’s thing. Cool!



...unless you don’t use Windows
Screeching halt: if you don’t have a windows computer this is not possible. Because they couldn’t just post the actual file that needs ot be burned to disc now could they? Oh no, they had to hide it inside a “.exe” file, a Windows-Only, completely unnecessary container for the real file.

Bonus insult? The instructions call for you to open the .exe file and extract the real file so you can burn it to disc. Yeah. Totally useless anyway.

Peace.