BD-UP5000 Universal Player Samsung [OFFICIAL OWNERS THREAD] & FAQ - Page 428

Finally "gave in"..albeit reluctantly... and recognized that Blu won "the war" and purchased a used 5000 to replace my Toshiba HD-A1. (Can't beleive the original firmware was still on it..I immediately bumped it up to v1.6)
I can still play my HD-DVD's but now I guess I can start to go Blu.
What's a good title to show off why Blu won the war on my Pioneer 720P display?

Pretty close on the timeline :-)

4 January 2008, Warner announces will stop supporting by June 2008
19 February 2008, Toshiba announces no new development of equipment
28 March 2008, HD-DVD Promotion Group dissolved

Thanks. Technically 4.

A reference BD, you ask? Try Tree of Life.

Since you have 1.6 you should try avatar. I have a 720p TV and Avatar looks amazing on it. I am hoping to upgrade to 1080p 3D soon so i can really enjoy my 5000.

Thanks, I see the Elizabeth two-movie pack. Guess I was too limited in my searches before. Thanks for the pointer.


Like you, it does appear that my BD head is indeed failing. We tried another bluray last night and it wouldn't play any more either even through we've watched this movie many times before.

I was one of the folks that bought the 5000 during the "mad rush" between the release cycle (when we were querying Best Buy's delivery schedule on a daily basis) and the announcement of the demise of HDDVD. So I've been through all of the firmware upgrades...


So I'm off to the Panasonic DMP-BDT 500 forum to wait in line for that "mad rush"...

Scott

We bought a zoo played just fine. Currently I am buying a new home, selling another and will be online but unable to watch any more BD movies starting in a week for 6-8 weeks. it's all a complicated mess furthered by some medical issues. That is what is taking me away from the home theater for 6 weeks. I suspect it will be mid to late June before I get the new home theater in the new house up even on a temporary basis. The blood sucking Realtors made me box up most of my bds that were not in cabinets or bookcases and I had to take them to my mother Inlaws basement I.e. the family storage unit. I have mostly hds still at our old house and just a few older bds. Had to work quickly when we decided to finally dejunk and list out home. It sold In only 2-3 days so that is a relief. No more showings unless the current deal falls through. Buying a new home is way fun, especially these days. I really hate selling a house, but having 7-8 showings and a Realtor tour in two days is a blessing and I can't complain in today's housing market. Not having two mortgage payments will be a great relief. I basically haven't been able to watch movies or much tv for the past couple weeks. First time I have let the DVR delete old stuff to make room since I was not paying attention. Unfortunately war games in hd that was on one of the movie channels a while back is toast.

Congrats. One house is enuff, lol.

Scott,

Before you give up on your 5000, try giving the lens and the disc a good clean. I have found that the 5000 is very sensitive to dirt. So I use a maxell blu-ray lens cleaner regularly. I also clean my discs with a soft cloth before playing, especially when they are rental discs. Others also use the cleaner for eye glasses to get rid of the fingerprints and other contamination on discs.

Worth a try.

Rick

Well I will own 2 for about 3 weeks if all goes well. First time I have bought a house before selling another one. I really hate showings and having to leave your house so others can poke around, home inspections and appraisals. sometimes I wish I lived in a large apartment and rented. Houses are hardly an investment anymore. But I can't complain in today's market getting a great deal and selling so quickly.

^I went the opposite direction (as of last year)...sick of apt. renting (neighbors are too close for comfort), happy to be in a house.

Thanks Rick for the tip, that's an excellent suggestion. I just ordered one from Amazon (free shipping with Prime). Amazon calls it "Maxell BR-LC Blu-ray Lens Cleaner" for $10.

Scott

I went that route and it extended the life of B-D play on my 5000 for a while (I don't recall the exact amount) but after a couple of months I was back to the same position of not being able to play B-D discs. Your results may vary, of course. I still run it periodically in order to keep the mechanism clear for HD-DVD play :-)

Mike

Remind me NEVER to buy and sell a house again. Geez haven't been able to watch a movie or get caught up on TV in ages. I think I will junk my av gear and start reading books again after all this ;-)

Anyhow, this is another thing you can try, if you have not already. If after you use the lens cleaner (BTW - the Maxell wind tunnel one is excellent, if that is what you got, also you need a couple brush based brute force ones as well in your arsenal) and still no luck you can rip into the unit, pop the top on the loader and clean the lens with a good Qtip, either dry or wet with 100% hooch or freon TF (if you can still find it, the freon, not the hooch). While you are in there lube the drive guide rails with a tiny bit of white lithium grease or silicone based lubricant (you want something clean that will never dry out and will not drip). Personally I have never recovered a 5K loader like this, but several here in the past have. I have made several loaders almost silent with the lube trick, recommended if the grinding noise gets on your nerves, but I never tear into a loader unless it be broke. I have a couple that are both marginal on BDs. One refuses to play shiny new Lionsgate BDs (only a couple I have ran into so far) and one does not deal with long movies at all (think it is a 2nd/dual layer issue?). Both of those have been brute forced cleaned and lubed and silent. Some day it is what all my players will end up with and will only be good for CD/DVD/HD and possibly some BDs? For some reason I have ran into the BD breaks issue with the loaders I have used to play movies more often. I of course have ran into may loaders that play BD but no HD or have various issues with HD. Fortunately I have trashed or returned all of the HD challenged loaders that have been in my possession (as far as I know and have tried). I hope I can find all my spare loaders after the move, if that ever happens.

Good luck on the recovery. I keep hoping that someone here will send a unit in for repair to Sammy and see if they still do the ~$110 or so repair post paid to them for loader issues. Thats way more than most folks would be willing to pay for a player these days, but beats the ~$250 for the cost of a guaranteed replacement from Samsung. I have considered sending in my project player with a bumb loader in order to get just one more brand new/repaired loader since I am down to one spare and working for the most part loaders in all 5 of my players. One of these days I need to eBay most of them whole or in parts and just move on to running the A35 for HD and a new player for BD and keep a 5K around for the up-conversion of DVDs.

It appears now that we may never see a firmware update for this player and I heard "officially" on another thread that LG has pulled the plug on support for the BH200. It actually has more issues cropping up than the 5K these days. Time to pull up stakes and move on. I have to run two 5Ks one running 1.6 and another 1.4 in order to play all my Disney's now anyhow so might as well run both a HD player and a "modern" BD player. I hope my A35 still runs, survives the move and never dies after.

Has anyone seen ANY 5K loaders listed online in the past 6 months or so. I haven't been paying attention to my bots on that. It appears that mint/perfect working complete 5Ks have gone up in price based on recent sales? Last time I needed loaders I just bought complete players and lucked out that the loaders were fully functional.

I wish Sammy would release firmware and the price would go way up.

Avatar (Three-Disc Extended Collector's Edition + BD-Live) arrived last night. will spin it up ASAP and see how it looks. It'll be my first BR viewing. Be interesting to see how it compares to my HD's...!

I also have not seen any loaders sold separately in a long, long time, and I agree that prices for working units are trending up.

I didn't have all that many HD-DVDs and many of those have come out in B-D versions. Since I have replacement B-D players now I am gradually replacing HD-DVDs with the B-D releases, there are only a couple of ones w/o replacements at this time. Fortunately I have no problem with HD-DVD playback and the 5000s are now only being used for those, thus getting rather low usage rates.

I agree that the odds of getting another firmware update are vanishingly small at this time :-(

FYI, my father watched the movie "Rubber" Blu-ray last night and it appeared to work just fine. He had also watched Appaloosa earlier this week without problems too.

Well, we tried the Maxwell lens cleaner but it didn't help (ran it through the 5000 several times).

When we put a blu-ray in, we get the gray popup. If we cycle the blu-ray a couple of times it will usually start playing.

DVD's don't have a problem.

Thanks for all for the pointer however.

Scott

Ya I have watched both of those and pretty sure I reported them both. I know I did on Rubber. That is a very interesting strange film, but you have to be in the right mood for it.

Based on your symptoms I'm sure your loader is failing, but...a brute force cleaning of the laser lenses and lube of the rails is sure to help. Also since you are having to reset it to get it to work, have you unplugged it from Internet/Ethernet (there is only one reason to hook a 5K up to the Internet now, to set the time with NTP, but it doesn't display anywhere so it does not matter), done a cold start (hold >| for 5-6 seconds) and cleared both HD and BD persistent memory in the system/setup menu? These things might help you, but I bet it is your loader overheating. Also try removing the player from any cabinet or enclosed space and/or operate it without the cover on to see if that helps. Could also possibly be a cold solder joint on the main board heating up and when you power cycle it cools down just enough to get things loaded.

By "cycle BD" are you saying you eject it and put it back in or power cycle or power plug cycle the player? What does the grey pop-up say? If it says disc cannot be played then probably loader failure. Are you up to speed on all the latest code?

I couldn't remember if I read a report or not, so I figured better safe since I knew he had watched a couple of movies recently. Rubber is kind of a throwback and a weirdness thing all at the same time.

Mad Men Season 3 Disc one loads and works like a champ on 1.4. Much better experience than Season 2.

Yes. I've tried a combination of things (and I do have the 1.6 firmware):
1. power on/off/on
2. drawer in/out/in
3. factory reset by holding down the ">" key on the player for 5 seconds

A combination of these three will usually allow a blu-ray to be played. Last night, my wife and I watched a brand new fresh-from-the-box "Elizabeth I" disk (see my comments from a couple of posts ago). It literally took 10 minutes before the disk would start playing. But once it started, everything was fine. By "playing" I mean just to get it going at all (BEFORE the FBI warning, previews, and the disk menu).

The "gray popup" that I referred to is reported on a post# 12782. It is an error produced by the 5000, not by the disk, and is a gray box in the middle of the screen with the error code listed. This gray popup is identical for any blu-ray disk that the 5000 complains about. Once this gray popup appears, the disk tray automatically opens.


I have already tried cleaning using the Maxell cleaning disk that others have suggested but that didn't help. I did not try more robust cleaning since I suspect that the blu-ray head is indeed failing (as others have also pointed out). Note that DVD's play without any problems. So the error seems to occur when it is loading the initial software from the blu-ray disk.

Thanks to all for the help. I've just ordered a Panasonic DMP-BDT500 to replace my failing 5000. So this will probably be my last 5000 post.

Scott

Anyone run into issues with Another Earth? I popped it in after the big move and it seemed fine but I used the skip button whenever possible. Last night I tried it and just let it sit and it seemed to get stuck and churn etc. at several places durning the load and things were choppy at the first of the movie and then settled down. I did not look at the disc so perhaps it is dirty, but I'm pretty sure I am the 1st to rent this disc from BB online. I have had the disc for a couple weeks and had not been able to get to it due to the move etc. Anyhow I was concerned about the loader in my main home theater unit but before that I had played Pans Labyrinth on HD, 3:10 From Yuma and a few other random discs without trouble in between the two playings of Another Earth. I bought two new sets of stands and a pair of surround back speakers since I now have room for 7.1. Pan's and 3:10 are amazing in 7.1 and I'm looking forward to watching all my > than 5.1 discs now. I am still messing with speaker placement and calibration, but it sounds pretty good now.

BTW - Another Earth is a Fox even-though it is from a studio that is normally now? I think there may be some code that is odd on there. I will try it again over the weekend and see what I get. I hope it was just the dust getting knocked out of the player after the move.

Still no firmware update, sigh.

The Darkest Hour played fine for me today. Was recommended by the young whipper snapper working at the local BlockBuster. Stupid movie, I ignored most of it while I worked on my laptop, never caught my attention at all.

Turns out that Another Earth acts a lot like the latest Narnia flick did (Dawn Treader?) Anyhow, if you skip through everything it plays fine. The one BB sent me had some marks on it from the mailer and shipping, so that might have been part of the problem?

I guess everyone abandoned their 5Ks while I was away moving ;-) Ya, I know you are all out there and there are not a lot of great releases out these days.

Soon I will be trying; In Time, Tower Heist, and Haywire.

I can confirm that Warhorse plays successfully with version 1.4 and does not with version 1.6. This makes sense since this is a Touchstone film and the newer Disney movies won't play with version 1.6.

Given that most of my viewing will likely be Disney DVD's, would it be worth downgrading to 1.4? Is that even possible?

Yes, it is. Pretty much these days I have to have both a 1.4 disc and a 1.6 disc handy and switch back and forth depending on the movie. Sigh.

Anyone else have issues with The Run Diary(s)? I have had it for quite some time and just tried it tonight. It was sketchy from the first. Slow loading and the loader was reading over and over. Once I go it playing it was fine until ~29 min. in when it froze and the loader was chugging over and over. This disc took 2-3 days longer than normal to come in the mail, the envelope was pretty beat up and it did not have the customary sleeve. I suspect heat damage and warping? It looked clean, but when I cleaned it, it had a film on it like it had been resurfaced? The guy at the store noticed the warping. I was pretty bored with the movie anyhow, so no loss. Someone else might want to try it and see if it plays for them. I will just wait for it to air on Starz as they usually play all the Sony flicks.

Speaking of Sony I swapped it for The Woman in Black, also a Sony/CBS film and a much newer release than TRD. It loaded up with no issues. Crossing my fingers that I won't have any issues with it. When TRD acted up I put a couple long discs that have been problematic in old broken loaders in the past. Played just fine and I watched nearly an hour of the middle of Drive since it is another recent Sony that came out about the same time as TRD.