Samsung Netflix Stream Freezes

[Gilbert Douglas]

I recently purchased a samsung bd-p1590 and have just started trying to stream movies through netflix instant play. Unfortunatley however, I have recently had a lot of problems with the movies freezing mid-play. Does anyone have any suggestions on potential fixes for this problem? I performed a firmware upgrade when first plugging the device.

[kateaux]

I will give this a try. How does one download an update for Samsung Blu Ray player?

[johnnymg]

Drill down through the system menus:

menu ---> Setup ---> System Setup ---> System Update.

cheers
JohnG

[kateaux]

Thanks much, Johnny MG. Will try tonight. I am also placing SD card in player. Love the quality of movies and the freeze only happens occasionally. The memory problem makes sense. Cheers to all who responded.

[madisonhack]

The problem appears to be memory related. The BD1600 (I assume your 1590 is nearly identical) has only 256Meg on board RAM. The memory must be filling up during viewing streaming video. I took a 2 Gig card out of my phone and added it to the front USB port. The problem has all but gone away. What happens after watching several movies is that the player stops (doesn't freeze like it used to), reloads and then continues to play from EXACTLY the same point. I'm going to put the 2 Gig back into my phone and get 8 GIG and try it. I think the problem will be non-existent with that much additional memory.

My theory is that Samsung has gotten so much bad press about it's proprietary dongle for watching Netflix that it is trying to figure a way to deal with this issue in firmware - which it likely can't do with the limited on board RAM. So, instead of announcing that you have to ALSO buy another $20 item to properly watch Netflix, they're leaving it up to the end users to figure it out for ourselves.

[[e-mail]]

Wonder if there is a way for the truly adept out there, to replace the onboard memory with a larger component? Next month a friend who is an electonics whiz will be visiting, I think I will speak with him about the possibility.

[madisonhack]

I doubt it. The reason is because the firmware of the chip set Samsung is using is proprietary language written for the hardware that is configured on the motherboard. The USB port, however, isn't proprietary. It's designed to accommodate lots of different manufacturers' USB drives. Before you get into the guts of your player, you might want to do what I did - take some memory out of your cell phone or camera and give it a try. Besides, on board RAM would cost more than removable memory.

Good luck. And remember - we have our own Hippocratic oaths to follow....do no harm to our own equipment while we experiment!

[[e-mail]]

LOL, are you in Medicine?? I was a FDNY Lieutenant Paramedic, so to hear that in context of electronics was pretty funny. Thanks for that.

[madisonhack]

I was an electronics technician for over twenty-five years in avionics. This sounds like an engineering deficiency that was pushed through in the sales department as something that could be dealt with "in the field".

Another commenter suggested it might be a time code drop out - and it might be - but I found it interesting that adding memory COMPLETELY changed the dynamics of the problem I was seeing.

My player has the latest firmware (2.05). When I was watching a streamed video from a power-on boot, the player worked fine for the first video. After I got about half way through the second video (without powering down the machine), the player would "freeze". I could command both forward and backward, but when the player reloaded the source, it always came up on video that had streamed several minutes earlier. Then the process continually repeated like this until I turned off the player and reloaded the video from Netflix.

Now - as I said - the player stops, reloads, and continues EXACTLY where it left off without any help from me. This leads me to think that data is clocked in and out of the USB memory during playback to handle the overflow. What I suspect now is that 2 Gig isn't sufficient to completely eradicate the problem, although the machine now has sufficient memory to reboot and "find" itself. I'm going to try 8 Gig - after 5, 6 or 8 movies, a person should turn the thing off and do something else anyway.

Good luck. I'll let you all know what I discover about my own machine.

Who knows - yours might actually be broken!

[[e-mail]]

As long as I don't FF or Pause through closing credits or anywhere else in a Netflix stream, I can go all day streaming NetFlix shows one after another without the freeze. I will add memory as per your advice, and then try everything to see if I can recreate the problem with the extra memory in place. If not, excellent!
Might be a while until I get the memory..all I have lying around is 1 GB microSD....when I do, I will stop in here to file a report.

[mscroggi]

I have four of these things.. They all have the same issues. I have streamed as many as 10 movies without powering down the unit without the freezes. I have also had a freeze occur 10 minutes into a flick right after powerup. It isnt consistent. The reason the unit restarts playing back a few minutes before the freeze every time, is this is the last updated timestamp the system had before it stopped updating (usually 3 or 4 minutes before the video freezes)

If the USB drive is being used for "system memory" then unplug it and plug it into a computer.. see if you have any data store on it.

[johnnymg]

Followup on my Sammy BD network 'streamers':
I have two BD-2500's. Both are connected via Cat5 cable to Linksys Routers and 5Mb/sec DSL. Both have been freeze free since changing the LiveBD settings to "allow all".

Today I purchased a Sammy BD-C5500C from Costco for $160. This new 'streamer' has Internet@TV capability:
Youtube, Vudu, live connect to local media on network computers. FWIW, it also has 1GB of internal RAM. Blu-Ray disk loads are WAY-WAY faster than the 2500's. For instance.......... Up In The Air loaded in 1:27 on the 2500 and 0:44 on the C5500. Regular DVD's load in about half the time also. All in all a very nice "upgrade"......... even though I was pleased with how the 2500's were working.

Haven't streamed much Netflix material yet with the C5500. Tried one HD movie and did a series of fast forwards-reverses and pauses and plays. So far so good. :-)

Anyway, good luck with your streaming.

JohnG

[johnnymg]

Followup on the 5500 Sammy: Just spent about an hour doing the youtube stream thingy. The access is pretty clunky due to the awkward search process using the remote. I also can't figure out how to stream 720HD youtube content. Seems like the system defaults to 360 rez. ??? Will take a bit more research to figure that one out.

cheers
JohnG