If you haven’t ditched your Blu-ray player for an HTPC yet, here’s a bit of motivation for doing so. Samsung’s official home theater forums (via ZDNet) have been flooded over the past few days with complaints about its players being stuck in a reboot loop that’s preventing them from loading or reading any discs properly.
“As soon as it receives power, it starts clicking and buzzing as if it’s trying to load a disc,” described one owner. “Nothing is displayed on the TV … If I insert a disc, I’ll hear the player start reading the disc, but then it starts the clicking and buzzing. At no point will anything be displayed on the TV screen. I unplugged the player for ten minutes. While it’s unplugged, I depressed the power button for 30 seconds. As soon as I plug it in, it immediately starts making noise. Any ideas? It’s about 2 years old. I’ve maybe used it about 20 times.”
“This issue is affecting hundreds, maybe thousands of customers having the same type of product,” wrote another. “Most of us have tried the various quick fixes like reset, restart, etc, but nothing works. What is more annoying is the fact that Samsung is not acknowledging the issues nor offering any explanations. Kindly look into your firmware or recent update that may be causing this and get us a fix as soon as possible.”
The problem appears to affect a variety of models, such as the BD-JM57C, BD-F5700, and HT-J5500W. Users believe that an expired certificate or botched firmware update could be the cause, but nobody knows the real story yet, as Samsung is still investigating.