‘Starship Troopers’ Playback Problems
An interesting post from High-Def Digest today…. Apparently a new Hollywood Blu Ray release wasn’t authored correct. Oops! Just goes to show that you should hire a company who know what their doing with BD authoring.
Q: I recently purchased the ‘Starship Troopers’ Blu-ray disc. When I brought it home, I discovered that when I placed it in my Blu-ray player (Sony BDP-350), it would only load as far as the loading screen. The “Loading” bar plays, followed by nothing but a black screen. I left it on for ten minutes and nothing happened. I upgraded my firmware to no effect before finally assuming the disc was in some way defective. I exchanged it for another copy, only to discover the same issue when I got home. When I took the second disc back, the store tested it on their own Blu-ray player - also a BDP-350 - and the same disc that gave me trouble played perfectly! As a result, they wouldn’t give me another replacement disc. I don’t entirely blame them, but now I’m stuck with a disc that I really want but can’t seem to play. What could possibly be wrong?
A: It turns out that the ‘Starship Troopers’ Blu-ray has an authoring glitch. When inserted into a BD-Live capable Blu-ray player, the disc attempts to confirm the player’s BD-Live status, regardless of whether you plan to use the BD-Live features or not. What this means is that your player must have internal memory installed for BD-Live, or the disc won’t play.
The Sony BDP-S350 doesn’t come with any internal memory out-of-the-box. You must install that yourself via a USB stick. (Some brands may take an SD card instead.) 1 GB should do. Once you do that, ‘Starship Troopers’ will play.
Fortunately, this should be an inexpensive fix. However, I agree that this is a tremendous nuisance. Frankly, it astounds me that major hardware manufacturers like Sony (Panasonic, Samsung, and other brands have also had the same problem) would ever build BD-Live Blu-ray players that don’t have the required memory built-in. 1 GB of memory certainly wouldn’t have added much to their manufacturing costs. Thankfully, this seems to be less of a problem in current models, but was very much an issue at the time yours was released.
