9 ms·

Blu-ray player keeps cycling on/off whenever plugged in

123 points by discreditable 6y ago

runnr_az 6y ago
Somebody somewhere at Samsung is gonna have a long weekend
- Someone1234 6y ago
  Assuming it is even possible to remotely recover? From the description it doesn't sound like it ever completes startup, and there's no USB port, so I'm not quite sure how local recovery would work? Keep in mind this is a 2015 BluRay player, so outside a class action I doubt Samsung will do anything and just act like they all just coincidentally failed. These players do have a "Hold Eject for 5 seconds" factory reset mode, but it doesn't appear to re-flash the factory firmware, only clear the settings.
  - nickthegreek 6y ago
    Also, Samsung doesn’t even make Blu-ray players anymore. They got out of that game in feb 2019. So it’s not like they could even offer someone a discount on a new one.
  - spectramax 6y ago
    Class action suits should require at the minimum replacement or repair of the product in question, including shipping to the user. Otherwise, lawyers get paid and I get $0.21 cent check in the mail.
    - godzillabrennus 6y ago
      So if that’s the route they go then by 2033 an impacted owner can register in a 85 step process to obtain a $5 check to use toward a new blu ray player that expires 90 days after it’s issued. Meanwhile the lawyers get to keep all the additional proceeds.
      - spectramax 6y ago
        The sad part is that you're not wrong and I have to concede with intense laughter.
  - toast0 6y ago
    Are you sure it doesn't have a USB port? Most blu-ray players do (some of the discs let you download something to usb storage for some reason), and the front panel has a USB logo according to the Amazon listing: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-BD-JM57C-Streaming-Blu-ray-Renewed/dp/B00ZIS0LGC/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-BD-JM57C-Streaming-Blu-ray-Re... https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61v%2BV4knawL._AC_SL1500_.jpg https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61v%2BV4kna...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- yumraj 6y ago
  Seems like a data/time issue. Who knows it'll fix itself tomorrow :)
- m463 6y ago
  (along with all their head-scratching locked-in customers)
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  In the legal department, maybe. From one of the replies: "I also got assistance from chat with Samsung Pro Care reps. I am trying to troubleshoot one of the players. Samsung kindly gave me the reset proceedure for my model which is to hold down eject button for 15 seconds. did not work for me. I requested if I could try firmware flash by USB. They kindly gave me a firmware zipped file which I unzipped and wrote to a USB stick. However since the players won't stay on the firmware flash proceedure instructions provided could not be initiated." Oopth. This is going to be expensive. It looks like well over a dozen models were affected.
g_p 6y ago
Sounds like a home cinema system is also affected by a similar issue - https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/Audio-Video/HT-J4500-home-cinema-cycling-on-and-off-repeatedly/td-p/1811217/highlight/false https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/Audio-Video/HT-J4500-hom... First thought coming to mind is if this is indeed a bad firmware update as some suggest. Or maybe an x509 certificate used internally to verify something like firmware signatures has expired? I guess a bit of digging through these threads might shed some light on if people accepted updates recently.
- m463 6y ago
  cannot install update, telemetry.dat has filled the partition :)
mcshicks 6y ago
Ha! This happened to mine yesterday, spent an hour doing all the resets, googling, did a quick worthless chat with samsung support. I ended up just going to Target and buying a Sony Blu Ray Player. I told my wife maybe somebody might post a fix on the internet in a month or so.
- m463 6y ago
  > worthless chat How can they not know this is happening minutes after the update is pushed? Is the chat farmed out to script-reading third-parties?
  - mcshicks 6y ago
    The guy asked me no questions and just said make a service request. I figured they already knew there was nothing to do and just trying to close the chat as quickly as possible.
    - m463 6y ago
      oh, that makes more sense.
  - markn951 6y ago
    Duh. Why would you expect otherwise.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    > How can they not know this is happening minutes after the update is pushed? - Maybe it only happens from a cold start, or maybe only when waking from sleep more. - The push likely takes hours - It might be hard to capture the right metric for if the push was good in time to stop the push. I wouldn't be shocked if support realized the issue first, but didn't have a way to quickly escalate to the firmware team. - When the push fails, by the time that team figured it out, at a big company, it could take at least a day to make it into the customer service script.
  - distances 6y ago
sundvor 6y ago
Lol. My new flagship top of the line Galaxy phone won't let me take pictures if a face is detected now without a 3-5 second delay from when I press the shutter. If subject turns around before then, the picture is instantly taken, and I'm instantly getting photos if no faces are detected as well. I've reproduced this across a number of conditions. This is great for the family photos.. They're really going strong with their software now.
- k12sosse 6y ago
  Have your tried turning your family's faces off, waiting 5 minutes, and then turning them back on?
- bobbiechen 6y ago
  I noticed some long delays taking photos of people (though not quite as long as yours) and found that disabling the "beauty" filter, which smoothens skin among other effects, reduced that delay.
  - sundvor 6y ago
    This is something different.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Look in the settings for a "face enhancement" feature and see if it can be turned off. I bet that's what it's trying to do with the faces it detects. https://www.insider.com/samsung-phones-default-beauty-mode-camera-airbrush-2016-6 https://www.insider.com/samsung-phones-default-beauty-mode-c...
  - sundvor 6y ago
    Turning that off was the first thing I did when I got the phone. Just checked it's still off. Cheers though!
netsharc 6y ago
Anyone in the 29 pages of comments figure out the problem? It seems to be full of users saying "me too!" and moaning about "I'm not paying to get this fixed!". I guess today's customer forums is a version of Borges' Library of Babel, but one with very dull contents.
- Crosseye_Jack 6y ago
  And if the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc person said to themselves “Oh look someone has already posted about this. No need to kick up a fuss about it so I’ll be on my way. The community managers or who ever run the forum may not flag the issue as quickly with the next level of tech support. But if you get an inrush of customers all saying “yo, shits broke...” The fire alarms get trigger sooner, if it’s a bad update it can get pulled sooner to lessen the number of affected customers and start the whole recovery process sooner. Sure a single high quality post from someone in the tech space who’s curiosity made them break out wireshark and give you a detailed bug report can do wonders. But such reports take time, you got to have someone actually decide it’s worth there time to investigate and report back. Or you can hear the high numbers of low detail reports and pull the fire alarm cause shits on fire somewhere.
mindslight 6y ago
When is it finally going to trickle into common sense that needlessly hooking an embedded device up to the Internet is a bad idea? An ethernet jack is an attractive nuisance, not a feature.
- jentist_retol 6y ago
  >needlessly hooking an embedded device up to the Internet is a bad idea It's a video player, some of the common uses of a device like this would be Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, and DIAL.
  - Bud 6y ago
    Using a 5-year-old Blu-ray player as a streaming device is incredibly stupid, though. Just like "smart" TVs are universally incredibly stupid.
    - aeyes 6y ago
      Why is it stupid if it works? Is my 6 year old smartphone stupid to use on the internet? Is my 20 year old keyboard which works excellent obsolete? Is my 25 year old microwave a hazard? Money doesn't grow on trees, why would I stop using a device only because it is 5 years old?
      - adamhearn 6y ago
        That’s obviously a straw man argument. It’s the same reason you don’t connect a windows XP embedded system to the internet. The embedded system may function excellently at its task, but most hardware manufacturers are not up to the task to providing long term support.
    - dehrmann 6y ago
      Having one device to rule them all is the dream.
- mike_d 6y ago
  It does play Netflix and other streaming services, which is hard to do without connectivity.
birdiesanders 6y ago
I would beg to venture expired certificate, firmware goes to validate itself, comes back expired, crashes because this scenario wasn’t considered, repeat.
- Tornhoof 6y ago
  The Players without Internet access are not affected. The system goes into a bootloop after that, even after disconnecting from the net. So something is apparently changed on the device. Maybe a temp/log file is filled with exceptions and the disk is now full.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kjaftaedi 6y ago
I scrolled through way too many posts, and not a single person mentioning whether they tried to reset the firmware via USB, and saw no support person suggesting it either. https://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/2015-blu-ray-disc-player-j5700-series https://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/2015-blu-r...
- mcshicks 6y ago
  I thought about that, but when I looked it seemed like you needed to use the menu to do it, and since it resets about every 5 seconds I don't think it's feasible to actually use the menu. I could get the one I had to open/close the tray reliably.
- DrScump 6y ago
  I've actually used their firmware update procedure to flash the update to my Samsung Blu-ray player when I got a movie that had unsupported codecs or something. The procedure (download a gzipped directory onto a USB drive, insert into USB port, boot) was well documented and straightforward (easy for anybody who's done related things like installing an O/S), worked the first try, and I've never missed a beat since). I miss the days when companies cared about the longevity of their products. Companies like IBM and Compaq were infamous for well-placed updates to drivers, firmware, BIOS, and documentation.
gjsman-1000 6y ago
Not quite related, but I picked up a used LG Blu-Ray player that claimed to have broken Wifi. Apparently, whoever programmed the firmware set it up to use LG's custom DNS servers, now shut down, and it had no public DNS fallback for this situation. It's amazing how little planning there is for when an IoT server goes down.
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  It's amazing how little planning there is for when an IoT server goes down. It's out of warranty, isn't it? Sounds like flawless planning to me. I mean, seriously. What incentive could a company possibly have to keep those servers running five minutes after the last product shipped goes out of support? Sure, you'll get mad and swear to buy your next IoT widget from some other company. But that company will do the same thing, because they have exactly the same incentives. This will have to be fixed legislatively... and as a liberty-minded kind of guy, I'm truly depressed by how often I find myself typing those words these days.
Ansil849 6y ago
Just musing aloud, but do we hold electronics companies to different standards than other companies? For example, imagine that the latest Slack update made all desktop clients crash, and that Slack support simply said to try restarting the client. There would be mass outrage, and the expectation of a prompt fix. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be much expectation of an immediate fix from Samsung in this thread. Or if a comparison more closer to same industry is desired, imagine if the issue was with Netflix instead. This makes me wonder aloud, are electronics behemoths held to lower standards?
- chairmanwow1 6y ago
  Expectations for them are way lower.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  Makes me wonder, are electronics simpler or more complex than software? That is, should we expect them to be better or worse?
  - thdrdt 6y ago
    Hardware is software embedded in electronics so it cannot easily be changed. But there are electronic components that can be programmed with software.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    > are electronics simpler or more complex than software Eh, yes?
- userbinator 6y ago
  I think they're held to higher standards than software companies, or at least were, since in the latter, "try restarting it" has been a commonly repeated mantra for decades. Or if a comparison more closer to same industry is desired, imagine if the issue was with Netflix instead. That's slightly different since it's a service with ongoing payment, and customers who will stop payment if the service fails to serve, whereas Samsung has already been paid by those who bought their hardware.
bArray 6y ago
Wow, somebody at Samsung is sure having an incredibly bad day... Flashing firmware to devices in the field is genuinely a really tough problem. Due to space, memory and processing limitations you can end up backed into a corner as an engineer. It may be the case where there is genuinely no way to recover from this - turning a $10k remote software patch job into a several million dollar product recall. We used to have a simple rule where you always had two firmwares in storage, a primary image and secondary image. If you see tonnes of unplanned reboots recently you fallback to the secondary image. It can also be manually rolled back by holding some button during boot. (Other reasons to falling back could also be a failed hash check or bad signing for example.) To be clear, this method also had potential flaws and two bad software updates in a row could be bad (it tries to mark "good" firmwares, but it isn't foolproof). I've seen other methods also make use of a minimalist boot system that is just about enough to flash a new firmware. Stick a USB device in and hold a button during boot for example - if no button press you pay very little in startup time and the main application boots instead. You then * really * test this fallback firmware to make sure it will be very reliable in the field from cold boot. This gets even more troubling when OTA (over the air) methods are more widely employed too, where there may not be any exposed programming port on the device. I remember seeing somebody brick a few hundred devices via bluetooth before somebody said "have you tested that firmware works?" - turns out it was a bad unchecked-in local build...
- MithrilTuxedo 6y ago
  We had to get Samsung to update their firmware to stop the 6,000 TVs we installed on a cruise ship from saturating the physically isolated 10GbE network with attempts to check for firmware updates.
  - slenk 6y ago
    1 Samsung TV causes an obscene amount of network calls, but 6000...wow
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    I wonder if there are enough IoT devices with sloppy firmware that network operators see periodic new connection bursts.
jb775 6y ago
Could it be an issue with surpassed time relative to when it was initially built? A bunch of people mentioned their hardware is roughly 2 years old: 86400(seconds) * 365(days) * 2(years) = 63,072,000
- dehrmann 6y ago
  The only things like this to look out for with sane implementations on modern hardware are at 24 and 49 days after 2^31 and 2^32 milliseconds have passed. At least until 2038.
zenexer 6y ago
Do not connect Samsung home media devices to the internet.[0][1][2][3] If you really want the internet-based multimedia features, get a separate, more secure device such as a Chromecast or Apple TV—and even those aren’t perfect.[4] How many times are we going to keep making the same mistakes? There is no benefit to connecting a Samsung TV or Blu-ray player to the internet when a $35 Chromecast works far better, has all the same features (plus more), doesn’t break a year or two after you buy it, and is more secure. There’s just no excuse. [0]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xy9p7n/samsung-tizen-operating-system-bugs-vulnerabilities https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xy9p7n/samsung-tizen-oper... [1]: https://www.consumerreports.org/televisions/samsung-roku-smart-tvs-vulnerable-to-hacking-consumer-reports-finds/ https://www.consumerreports.org/televisions/samsung-roku-sma... [2]: https://threatvector.cylance.com/en_us/home/many-popular-smart-tvs-have-serious-vulnerabilities.html https://threatvector.cylance.com/en_us/home/many-popular-sma... [3]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/17/18681683/samsung-smart-tv-virus-scan-malware-attack-tweet https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/17/18681683/samsung-smart-tv... [4]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/02/chromecast-bug-hackers-havoc/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/02/chromecast-bug-hackers-hav...
- ta17711771 6y ago
  Raspberry Pi + Kodi + Kore Android remote or other cheap hardware remote + YouTube + Emby/Plex + Netflix, solves a lot of usecases for dirt cheap.
  - zenexer 6y ago
    Yup, if you’re willing to tinker, you can make a pretty nifty home media setup for practically nothing, customized to your liking. But for everyone else, Chromecast et al are plug-’n-play. If you’re an Apple person and are willing to spend a bit extra, Apple TV’s UI/UX is hard to beat without making your own system.
    - freetonik 6y ago
      I find Apple TV's UX incredibly annoying and inaccessible. Gesture based navigation with ambiguous rules, lack of clear contrast on selected items and modal UI make me wanna ditch Apple TV, but I don't know of good alternatives.
noisy_boy 6y ago
Don't these devices have one of those hardware reset holes like routers do? I find them very useful because worst case scenario, just insert a pin and wait for 10s which is great if your menu/software side is broken.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  I've played with OpenWRT a lot. This might have changed, but for a long time, routers stored the firmware on a flash chip and settings on an nvram chip. They might be the same chip, but you can think of settings and the OS being logically separated. The reset button reset nvram. If the vendor did an OTA firmware update (which no one used to to) and sent a bad update, the reset switch won't help. Some routers have recovery procedures that flash using the bootloader (also on the flash chip, but it's obviously best not to mess with it), downloading the firmware from a PC. If that fails, that's the end of the officially supported options that a 80th percentile user can do.
  - noisy_boy 6y ago
    I didn't know these details - thank you.
perl4ever 6y ago
I had a Pixel that went into an infinite reboot loop. The below has information I never heard of before, that it might be related to mold growth on the circuit board?? https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/2235808?hl=en https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/2235808?hl=en
greatgib 6y ago
Does not looks like that it is an update that broke it, look at that comment: << Re: Blu-ray player BD-JM57C, keeps cycling on/off whenever plugged in yesterday • last updated yesterday I have a BD J5700, it started doing the same thing on 06/18/2020. It has never been connected to an Ethernet and as far as I know it has never been updated. I believe it is a preprogrammed failure. >>
jdofaz 6y ago
My samsung 4k UHD Bluray player is still working ok

123 points by discreditable 6y ago

runnr_az 6y ago

Somebody somewhere at Samsung is gonna have a long weekend

Someone1234 6y ago
Assuming it is even possible to remotely recover? From the description it doesn't sound like it ever completes startup, and there's no USB port, so I'm not quite sure how local recovery would work? Keep in mind this is a 2015 BluRay player, so outside a class action I doubt Samsung will do anything and just act like they all just coincidentally failed. These players do have a "Hold Eject for 5 seconds" factory reset mode, but it doesn't appear to re-flash the factory firmware, only clear the settings.
- nickthegreek 6y ago
  Also, Samsung doesn’t even make Blu-ray players anymore. They got out of that game in feb 2019. So it’s not like they could even offer someone a discount on a new one.
- spectramax 6y ago
  Class action suits should require at the minimum replacement or repair of the product in question, including shipping to the user. Otherwise, lawyers get paid and I get $0.21 cent check in the mail.
  - godzillabrennus 6y ago
    So if that’s the route they go then by 2033 an impacted owner can register in a 85 step process to obtain a $5 check to use toward a new blu ray player that expires 90 days after it’s issued. Meanwhile the lawyers get to keep all the additional proceeds.
    - spectramax 6y ago
      The sad part is that you're not wrong and I have to concede with intense laughter.
- toast0 6y ago
  Are you sure it doesn't have a USB port? Most blu-ray players do (some of the discs let you download something to usb storage for some reason), and the front panel has a USB logo according to the Amazon listing: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-BD-JM57C-Streaming-Blu-ray-Renewed/dp/B00ZIS0LGC/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-BD-JM57C-Streaming-Blu-ray-Re... https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61v%2BV4knawL._AC_SL1500_.jpg https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/61v%2BV4kna...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
yumraj 6y ago
Seems like a data/time issue. Who knows it'll fix itself tomorrow :)
m463 6y ago
(along with all their head-scratching locked-in customers)
CamperBob2 6y ago
In the legal department, maybe. From one of the replies: "I also got assistance from chat with Samsung Pro Care reps. I am trying to troubleshoot one of the players. Samsung kindly gave me the reset proceedure for my model which is to hold down eject button for 15 seconds. did not work for me. I requested if I could try firmware flash by USB. They kindly gave me a firmware zipped file which I unzipped and wrote to a USB stick. However since the players won't stay on the firmware flash proceedure instructions provided could not be initiated." Oopth. This is going to be expensive. It looks like well over a dozen models were affected.

g_p 6y ago

Sounds like a home cinema system is also affected by a similar issue - https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/Audio-Video/HT-J4500-home-cinema-cycling-on-and-off-repeatedly/td-p/1811217/highlight/false https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/Audio-Video/HT-J4500-hom... First thought coming to mind is if this is indeed a bad firmware update as some suggest. Or maybe an x509 certificate used internally to verify something like firmware signatures has expired? I guess a bit of digging through these threads might shed some light on if people accepted updates recently.

m463 6y ago
cannot install update, telemetry.dat has filled the partition :)

mcshicks 6y ago

Ha! This happened to mine yesterday, spent an hour doing all the resets, googling, did a quick worthless chat with samsung support. I ended up just going to Target and buying a Sony Blu Ray Player. I told my wife maybe somebody might post a fix on the internet in a month or so.

m463 6y ago
> worthless chat How can they not know this is happening minutes after the update is pushed? Is the chat farmed out to script-reading third-parties?
- mcshicks 6y ago
  The guy asked me no questions and just said make a service request. I figured they already knew there was nothing to do and just trying to close the chat as quickly as possible.
  - m463 6y ago
    oh, that makes more sense.
- markn951 6y ago
  Duh. Why would you expect otherwise.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  > How can they not know this is happening minutes after the update is pushed? - Maybe it only happens from a cold start, or maybe only when waking from sleep more. - The push likely takes hours - It might be hard to capture the right metric for if the push was good in time to stop the push. I wouldn't be shocked if support realized the issue first, but didn't have a way to quickly escalate to the firmware team. - When the push fails, by the time that team figured it out, at a big company, it could take at least a day to make it into the customer service script.
- distances 6y ago

sundvor 6y ago

Lol. My new flagship top of the line Galaxy phone won't let me take pictures if a face is detected now without a 3-5 second delay from when I press the shutter. If subject turns around before then, the picture is instantly taken, and I'm instantly getting photos if no faces are detected as well. I've reproduced this across a number of conditions. This is great for the family photos.. They're really going strong with their software now.

k12sosse 6y ago
Have your tried turning your family's faces off, waiting 5 minutes, and then turning them back on?
bobbiechen 6y ago
I noticed some long delays taking photos of people (though not quite as long as yours) and found that disabling the "beauty" filter, which smoothens skin among other effects, reduced that delay.
- sundvor 6y ago
  This is something different.
userbinator 6y ago
Look in the settings for a "face enhancement" feature and see if it can be turned off. I bet that's what it's trying to do with the faces it detects. https://www.insider.com/samsung-phones-default-beauty-mode-camera-airbrush-2016-6 https://www.insider.com/samsung-phones-default-beauty-mode-c...
- sundvor 6y ago
  Turning that off was the first thing I did when I got the phone. Just checked it's still off. Cheers though!

netsharc 6y ago

Anyone in the 29 pages of comments figure out the problem? It seems to be full of users saying "me too!" and moaning about "I'm not paying to get this fixed!". I guess today's customer forums is a version of Borges' Library of Babel, but one with very dull contents.

Crosseye_Jack 6y ago
And if the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc person said to themselves “Oh look someone has already posted about this. No need to kick up a fuss about it so I’ll be on my way. The community managers or who ever run the forum may not flag the issue as quickly with the next level of tech support. But if you get an inrush of customers all saying “yo, shits broke...” The fire alarms get trigger sooner, if it’s a bad update it can get pulled sooner to lessen the number of affected customers and start the whole recovery process sooner. Sure a single high quality post from someone in the tech space who’s curiosity made them break out wireshark and give you a detailed bug report can do wonders. But such reports take time, you got to have someone actually decide it’s worth there time to investigate and report back. Or you can hear the high numbers of low detail reports and pull the fire alarm cause shits on fire somewhere.

mindslight 6y ago

When is it finally going to trickle into common sense that needlessly hooking an embedded device up to the Internet is a bad idea? An ethernet jack is an attractive nuisance, not a feature.

jentist_retol 6y ago
>needlessly hooking an embedded device up to the Internet is a bad idea It's a video player, some of the common uses of a device like this would be Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, and DIAL.
- Bud 6y ago
  Using a 5-year-old Blu-ray player as a streaming device is incredibly stupid, though. Just like "smart" TVs are universally incredibly stupid.
  - aeyes 6y ago
    Why is it stupid if it works? Is my 6 year old smartphone stupid to use on the internet? Is my 20 year old keyboard which works excellent obsolete? Is my 25 year old microwave a hazard? Money doesn't grow on trees, why would I stop using a device only because it is 5 years old?
    - adamhearn 6y ago
      That’s obviously a straw man argument. It’s the same reason you don’t connect a windows XP embedded system to the internet. The embedded system may function excellently at its task, but most hardware manufacturers are not up to the task to providing long term support.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    Having one device to rule them all is the dream.
mike_d 6y ago
It does play Netflix and other streaming services, which is hard to do without connectivity.

birdiesanders 6y ago

I would beg to venture expired certificate, firmware goes to validate itself, comes back expired, crashes because this scenario wasn’t considered, repeat.

Tornhoof 6y ago
The Players without Internet access are not affected. The system goes into a bootloop after that, even after disconnecting from the net. So something is apparently changed on the device. Maybe a temp/log file is filled with exceptions and the disk is now full.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kjaftaedi 6y ago

I scrolled through way too many posts, and not a single person mentioning whether they tried to reset the firmware via USB, and saw no support person suggesting it either. https://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/2015-blu-ray-disc-player-j5700-series https://www.samsung.com/us/support/owners/product/2015-blu-r...

mcshicks 6y ago
I thought about that, but when I looked it seemed like you needed to use the menu to do it, and since it resets about every 5 seconds I don't think it's feasible to actually use the menu. I could get the one I had to open/close the tray reliably.
DrScump 6y ago
I've actually used their firmware update procedure to flash the update to my Samsung Blu-ray player when I got a movie that had unsupported codecs or something. The procedure (download a gzipped directory onto a USB drive, insert into USB port, boot) was well documented and straightforward (easy for anybody who's done related things like installing an O/S), worked the first try, and I've never missed a beat since). I miss the days when companies cared about the longevity of their products. Companies like IBM and Compaq were infamous for well-placed updates to drivers, firmware, BIOS, and documentation.

gjsman-1000 6y ago

Not quite related, but I picked up a used LG Blu-Ray player that claimed to have broken Wifi. Apparently, whoever programmed the firmware set it up to use LG's custom DNS servers, now shut down, and it had no public DNS fallback for this situation. It's amazing how little planning there is for when an IoT server goes down.

CamperBob2 6y ago
It's amazing how little planning there is for when an IoT server goes down. It's out of warranty, isn't it? Sounds like flawless planning to me. I mean, seriously. What incentive could a company possibly have to keep those servers running five minutes after the last product shipped goes out of support? Sure, you'll get mad and swear to buy your next IoT widget from some other company. But that company will do the same thing, because they have exactly the same incentives. This will have to be fixed legislatively... and as a liberty-minded kind of guy, I'm truly depressed by how often I find myself typing those words these days.

Ansil849 6y ago

Just musing aloud, but do we hold electronics companies to different standards than other companies? For example, imagine that the latest Slack update made all desktop clients crash, and that Slack support simply said to try restarting the client. There would be mass outrage, and the expectation of a prompt fix. On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be much expectation of an immediate fix from Samsung in this thread. Or if a comparison more closer to same industry is desired, imagine if the issue was with Netflix instead. This makes me wonder aloud, are electronics behemoths held to lower standards?

chairmanwow1 6y ago
Expectations for them are way lower.
perl4ever 6y ago
Makes me wonder, are electronics simpler or more complex than software? That is, should we expect them to be better or worse?
- thdrdt 6y ago
  Hardware is software embedded in electronics so it cannot easily be changed. But there are electronic components that can be programmed with software.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  > are electronics simpler or more complex than software Eh, yes?
userbinator 6y ago
I think they're held to higher standards than software companies, or at least were, since in the latter, "try restarting it" has been a commonly repeated mantra for decades. Or if a comparison more closer to same industry is desired, imagine if the issue was with Netflix instead. That's slightly different since it's a service with ongoing payment, and customers who will stop payment if the service fails to serve, whereas Samsung has already been paid by those who bought their hardware.

bArray 6y ago

Wow, somebody at Samsung is sure having an incredibly bad day... Flashing firmware to devices in the field is genuinely a really tough problem. Due to space, memory and processing limitations you can end up backed into a corner as an engineer. It may be the case where there is genuinely no way to recover from this - turning a $10k remote software patch job into a several million dollar product recall. We used to have a simple rule where you always had two firmwares in storage, a primary image and secondary image. If you see tonnes of unplanned reboots recently you fallback to the secondary image. It can also be manually rolled back by holding some button during boot. (Other reasons to falling back could also be a failed hash check or bad signing for example.) To be clear, this method also had potential flaws and two bad software updates in a row could be bad (it tries to mark "good" firmwares, but it isn't foolproof). I've seen other methods also make use of a minimalist boot system that is just about enough to flash a new firmware. Stick a USB device in and hold a button during boot for example - if no button press you pay very little in startup time and the main application boots instead. You then * really * test this fallback firmware to make sure it will be very reliable in the field from cold boot. This gets even more troubling when OTA (over the air) methods are more widely employed too, where there may not be any exposed programming port on the device. I remember seeing somebody brick a few hundred devices via bluetooth before somebody said "have you tested that firmware works?" - turns out it was a bad unchecked-in local build...

MithrilTuxedo 6y ago
We had to get Samsung to update their firmware to stop the 6,000 TVs we installed on a cruise ship from saturating the physically isolated 10GbE network with attempts to check for firmware updates.
- slenk 6y ago
  1 Samsung TV causes an obscene amount of network calls, but 6000...wow
- dehrmann 6y ago
  I wonder if there are enough IoT devices with sloppy firmware that network operators see periodic new connection bursts.

jb775 6y ago

Could it be an issue with surpassed time relative to when it was initially built? A bunch of people mentioned their hardware is roughly 2 years old: 86400(seconds) * 365(days) * 2(years) = 63,072,000

dehrmann 6y ago
The only things like this to look out for with sane implementations on modern hardware are at 24 and 49 days after 2^31 and 2^32 milliseconds have passed. At least until 2038.

zenexer 6y ago

Do not connect Samsung home media devices to the internet.[0][1][2][3] If you really want the internet-based multimedia features, get a separate, more secure device such as a Chromecast or Apple TV—and even those aren’t perfect.[4] How many times are we going to keep making the same mistakes? There is no benefit to connecting a Samsung TV or Blu-ray player to the internet when a $35 Chromecast works far better, has all the same features (plus more), doesn’t break a year or two after you buy it, and is more secure. There’s just no excuse. [0]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xy9p7n/samsung-tizen-operating-system-bugs-vulnerabilities https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xy9p7n/samsung-tizen-oper... [1]: https://www.consumerreports.org/televisions/samsung-roku-smart-tvs-vulnerable-to-hacking-consumer-reports-finds/ https://www.consumerreports.org/televisions/samsung-roku-sma... [2]: https://threatvector.cylance.com/en_us/home/many-popular-smart-tvs-have-serious-vulnerabilities.html https://threatvector.cylance.com/en_us/home/many-popular-sma... [3]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/17/18681683/samsung-smart-tv-virus-scan-malware-attack-tweet https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/17/18681683/samsung-smart-tv... [4]: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/02/chromecast-bug-hackers-havoc/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/02/chromecast-bug-hackers-hav...

ta17711771 6y ago
Raspberry Pi + Kodi + Kore Android remote or other cheap hardware remote + YouTube + Emby/Plex + Netflix, solves a lot of usecases for dirt cheap.
- zenexer 6y ago
  Yup, if you’re willing to tinker, you can make a pretty nifty home media setup for practically nothing, customized to your liking. But for everyone else, Chromecast et al are plug-’n-play. If you’re an Apple person and are willing to spend a bit extra, Apple TV’s UI/UX is hard to beat without making your own system.
  - freetonik 6y ago
    I find Apple TV's UX incredibly annoying and inaccessible. Gesture based navigation with ambiguous rules, lack of clear contrast on selected items and modal UI make me wanna ditch Apple TV, but I don't know of good alternatives.

noisy_boy 6y ago

Don't these devices have one of those hardware reset holes like routers do? I find them very useful because worst case scenario, just insert a pin and wait for 10s which is great if your menu/software side is broken.

dehrmann 6y ago
I've played with OpenWRT a lot. This might have changed, but for a long time, routers stored the firmware on a flash chip and settings on an nvram chip. They might be the same chip, but you can think of settings and the OS being logically separated. The reset button reset nvram. If the vendor did an OTA firmware update (which no one used to to) and sent a bad update, the reset switch won't help. Some routers have recovery procedures that flash using the bootloader (also on the flash chip, but it's obviously best not to mess with it), downloading the firmware from a PC. If that fails, that's the end of the officially supported options that a 80th percentile user can do.
- noisy_boy 6y ago
  I didn't know these details - thank you.

perl4ever 6y ago

I had a Pixel that went into an infinite reboot loop. The below has information I never heard of before, that it might be related to mold growth on the circuit board?? https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/2235808?hl=en https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/2235808?hl=en

greatgib 6y ago

Does not looks like that it is an update that broke it, look at that comment: << Re: Blu-ray player BD-JM57C, keeps cycling on/off whenever plugged in yesterday • last updated yesterday I have a BD J5700, it started doing the same thing on 06/18/2020. It has never been connected to an Ethernet and as far as I know it has never been updated. I believe it is a preprogrammed failure. >>

jdofaz 6y ago

My samsung 4k UHD Bluray player is still working ok