LG bd-530 - Page 3

We also tried a regular DVD movie and the Blue Ray player did the same thing with the video and audio.

ah I see. Nope, not at all. I just picked it up a few days ago, and hooked it up to my parents tv for them to watch the one or two movies a year they will watch, and I didn't know it was a new model, so the first thing I instinctively wanted to do was to just right out of the gate make sure I put the newest firmware on there.

did you try a different hdmi cable. Sounds like a cable issue to me.

Yeah, we did try another HDMI cable.

What is your setup like? HDMI directly to TV or through an HDMI switcher?

Posts about the BD-530 here in this thread have been positive. But I'm a bit concerned about these LG players after reading another thread. Here are a few quotes from that thread, and the link (xx=tt).

hxxp://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=19079733



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I'm wondering whether this box will kill my hard drive too. And that wouldn't be much of a holiday for me.

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I didn't even know this thing didn't have an optical audio out on it, LOL. Shows how much research I did on it. I basically wanted to get something mega cheap to hook up to my parents tv so they can watch my movie collection. So it's not like they care.

Just bought the BD530 yesterday @ Wal-Mart. Ofcourse it was $65, and selling like hot cakes. I had to call 10 stores before I found one. Drove a country mile to get it, only to bring it home and hook it up to 2 different TV's with two different HDMI cords. No picture!!!!! Just a blank screen. ------FIREBALL!!!!------Gave this one a chance because I didn't want to wait for Black Friday early bird deals (not guaranteed to get one). Anywhoo. Will be taking it back tommorrow and exchanging. Customer service agents says it may have a "bad" HDMI port (frown). I've had a cheap Phillips/Magnavox for 2+ years. No defects, ridiculous "firmware" updates or any of that other crap. Will let you guys know if I have better luck.

P.S......Fireball just means I'm mad (heh,heh).

think about the margins LG is making on this one - maybe $10 on a good day. Not a lot of money to invest in quality control. I got lucky 2/2 working!

What is so "ridiculous" about a company continuing to improve product performance and compatibility after the sale by releasing firmware updates? That's an absurd thing to complain about, and other manufacturers are doing exactly the same thing.

What he probably means is that they don't need to do updates because their products don't suffer from the same defects as other manufacturers.

While I love that LG continues to support their product and give it firmware updates, I wish they didn't have to do this so often because the firmware on their 2010 products is so buggy. I still cannot watch 'The Rock' on Blu-ray without the player freezing at the menu (only way to escape this is shutting off the player), and people are still having problems with new releases from September. I don't understand what's so hard about making the player just 'play' the damn Blu-rays. It's a Blu-ray player! Why does it take nearly a year of firmware updates just to make it stable (and it's still not stable, by the way)?

The .211C firmware for the LG BD550/570/590 player was flawless. Then they decided to add in things like MLB TV, Napster, and whatever else, and now so many Blu-rays have issues. They fixed most of the problems a couple of months back, but many new releases are still not playing without skipping. Now that the Collector's Edition for 'Avatar' came out, I imagine we will be getting another firmware update that fixes these playback issues as I imagine that disc will surely cause some.

Don't think the average buyer of this player has any interest (or knowledge) in callibrating it, but I have found I had to turn down brightness one to avoid clipping. YMMV.

Picked up this nice little player a few days ago in my local WM and so far I'm loving it! For $65 it's a pretty good machine!

Now about mkv playback... I have most of my mkv files playing perfectly fine, but few others will not play and no error message comes up on the screen -- the screen flashes for a second and goes right back to the name of the file.

So, last night i was trying a few different options and finally one program did the magic -- DVD Fab "File to File" conversion. After I processed non-working mkv through DVD Fab mkv conversion with default profile / settings it's now playing fine in the player!!! It took a very long time to convert the file though. I thought I'd share this with everybody :-)

I just got wind of this nifty little player through BF-day advertising. I have a brand new Sammy TV that has WiFi, internet apps and DLNA, so why pay extra for these capabilities in a Blu-ray player, is what I'm thinking.

All I really want is something dependable that plays commercial Blu-ray discs well. Anyone have trouble playing commercial Blu-rays? If not, I think I may have found a Blu-ray player with positive WAF. (That's Wife Acceptance Factor.)

Do you have any idea what fixes or features come in this new firmware?

It is absurd to complain about firmware updates and shows little or no understand of the Blu-Ray format and copy protection. Blu-Ray disks were designed to change the copy protection to prevent piracy. Many new disks can not play on older players with new features. Firmware updates help keep your machine current and also may add new features. I would complain if the company that sold the unit did not offer updates.

I do not have any idea of what the latest firmware does. It might just be to improve playing of certain disks.

How do you explain 2-year old players that haven't had firmware updates since they came out, being able to play something that our new players cannot? Doesn't that mean that these newer players (like the ones from LG and Samsung) were poorly designed? Perhaps the problem is not with copy protection, but rather, certain features that the disk uses - that some manufacturers never tested for (while others did).

Discussing this with you is a trivial pursuit.

How so? I'm just going by first-hand experience. I clearly have a very buggy player (the LG series) that has had constant playback problems. It's getting firmware updates constantly to fix these problems. These issues are not with copy protection. Also, there are various people with older players that do not have these problems. Are you saying that I was wrong when I said that manufacturers like Samsung and LG released buggy players!? If so, explain how these same discs work fine on these older players.

(I am aware that some discs introduce new copy protection, this is not what we are talking about - we are talking about buggy players - or at least, me and the guy who brought up the firmware updates are talking about that.)

In addition, I can prove my point by saying that the .211.C firmware of the LG BD550/570/590 was pretty flawless in terms of playback. The firmware update after that destroyed playback for 50% of my collection. It took LG about 5 months to fix the issues (and now there are issues with every big title released since September - still waiting for a fix).

I think you misunderstood my point if you think the discussion is trivial, unless you meant to say that you knew that I am right.

It's quite clear that certain companies have more problems with others when it comes to playback problems and firmware fixes. Some companies get it right before they release the product, and others rely on the fact that they can always patch it up later via an update. If it were simply a "copy protection" issue, we still wouldn't be waiting to be able to play 'Iron Man 2,' which was released nearly 2 months ago. I would think that by now, a Blu-ray manufacturer like LG would have the keys needed to play back that title. Also, why does 'The Rock,' a title released in 2008, still causes my player to freeze (to the point where I have to actually unplug it)? These are not copy protection issues. These are incompetence issues.

All I was saying was how the majority of LG's firmware updates are not to add in the new copy protection keys, but rather, to fix their playback problems which stem from incompetent engineering. You see, I'm not denying that certain discs come with new copy protection. There is no denying that. My beef with LG isn't that they need to give us firmware updates to implement the new copy protection. My beef with LG is that they either take too long to do so (we're going on 2 months with 'Iron Man 2' here), or that often enough, they end up screwing up playback with some other titles (like when we couldn't play the majority of VC-1 encoded Blu-rays for a period of 2 months+). Perhaps I should have been more clear, and perhaps you should have read what I wrote more carefully before replying the way you did.

P.S. I always thought that discs with new copy protection would at least say, "You need to update your firmware" when you try to play them. Not with LG. LG will let you get 30 minutes into the movie, and then start skipping chapters until there is 30 minutes left of the movie. Or it will freeze within the first minute, and you have to fast-forward a little bit in order for it to continue playing. Or, you need to change the output from 24hz to 60hz. And so on and so forth. Not copy protection problems. Engineering problems.

OK guys! Take it easy :-)
Let's get back to the original topic here -- the BD-530 model. So, is it a good idea to run firmware update or is it kinda like "if not broken don't fix it" thing?

Can anybody confirm any improvements or otherwise after updating BD-530 with new firmware?

LOL, well you already know my stance. Updating firmware on LG players is like playing Russian roulette. But, I digress. I will stop bashing on them as soon as they fix all of these playback issues. It seems that you guys, with the 530, are running a different type of firmware than those with the 550/570/590 - at least, according to LG's webpage (who knows how reliable that is, though). So, you might now have such a buggy product like the rest of us.

I'm kinda new to the whole BR player deal -- I always used my PC before and mainly for mkv files. And now I got this player (BD-530) and so far it played everything without any issue with the exception of the few mkv files that it could not play (but I think the issues are with the files and not with the player). And BTW -- I was able to fix it by re-encoding mkv file that wasn't playing and now it works. So, when you say "playback issues" what exactly do you mean by that? I'm just curious...

Those of us with the BD 550/570/590 have had our share of Blu-ray playback issues (as well as some MKV issues with SOME MKVs, which needed to be re-muxed with an earlier version of mkvmerge). The issues that I mentioned in the post above are just some of the issues we've had.

At first, everything played fine, except certain titles at 24hz. So, they came out with a fix and then everything was good. The next firmware updated introduced some new Netcast apps, but it broke playback for a lot of VC-1 encoded Blu-rays, and a handful of MPEG-4 AVC encoded Blu-rays. What I mean by this, is they would either freeze within the first few seconds of playback, or they would keep skipping chapters every few minutes.

Now, pretty much everything plays fine except for a lot of titles released after September (The Proposition - Special Edition, Iron Man 2, Alien Anthology, Apocalypse Now, etc...). Surprisingly, the Extended Cut of Avatar seems to play fine (so far, at least, I've only made it 3 chapters - will watch the rest later). What I mean by this, is that you get a few chapters in and then it will start skipping and it will skip several chapters. This has been an issue for going on 2 months now, so I imagine it will be fixed pretty soon (I hope).

Thanks DeAd MiKe!
Now I know what i'm up against (in case it starts happening :-)

You got it. So, I'm about halfway through the extended cut of Avatar and it skipped twice (only a couple of minutes, I was able to rewind to the point right after the skip, and watch from there). I imagine that the next firmware update will sort that out.

How true. All one has to do is read the insert on many Blu-Ray disks about firmware updates or do a little research and one will find the answer. People have the right to believe anything they want but they should at least understand what they are talking about. Enough said!!!

lol - are you guys purposely missing the point or what?

So, pray tell, which manufactures make Blu-ray players that never require firmware updates for any reason?

Did I say any reason? And way to take a quote out of context. Let's look at the whole thing:

There was a wink after the part that you first quoted me for, which you conveniently left out of your quote. Obviously (but not to you, it seems), it implied that my statement was not to be taken literally, and that I was taking a jab at LG - as the rest of my post makes clear. Do you guys have reading problems, or are you just dense, or are you denying the fact that there are manufacturers out there that cannot handle this format as well as some other manufacturers? I was pretty clear that I was talking about LG's incompetence when it comes to playback issues (and that their constant firmware updates are to fix their engineering errors, and not simply to add in the latest copy protection codes). I then had another big post dedicated to this point, which you also conveniently forgot to quote.

The part that you did quote ("How do you explain 2-year old players that haven't had firmware updates since they came out, being able to play something that our new players cannot?") was also explained in depth, in the rest of that post.

I'm really starting to wonder about you guys now...