A somewhat serious software snag seems to have hit a range of Samsung Blu-ray players in recent days, with owners complaining that their disc-playing devices are stuck in an endless reboot loop.
With reports from Reddit, Samsung support forums, ZDNet and elsewhere flooding in, it looks as though the issue affects a variety of different models – and at the time of writing there’s no explanation or fix.
Users say their Blu-ray players are cycling through various screens with no way to get out of the loop, leaving the devices pretty much useless. That’s not ideal when you’ve paid good prices to watch your high-resolution Blu-ray discs in the comfort of your home.
According to what we’ve read online, restarting the Blu-ray players doesn’t solve the problem, and nor does performing a hard reset to make the devices start up fully again from scratch.
Borked Blu-ray blues
From the user reports posted online, it sounds as though Samsung is aware of the problem, though it hasn’t yet made an official statement about it or offered anything in the way of a fix.
Hopefully, a new software update might be enough to get all of these Blu-ray players working again. If not, it’s possible that those with affected machines will have to send them back to Samsung to be repaired in-house.
While no one knows for sure what’s causing these issues, the most likely culprit is an expired security certificate that means the players can’t properly connect to the web. A botched firmware update might also be to blame.
Not everyone experiencing problems is seeing their devices stuck in a loop – some players are staying on, but won’t respond to button pushes. If an expired security certificate is to blame, then it wouldn’t be the first time.
