I rented the Blu-ray disc of Pineapple Express from Netflix the other day, and had a real fun time (read: had problems) getting it to play on my Samsung BD-P1600 Blu-ray player. After inserting the disc, it would spin up, start showing the loading screen (the little white clouds on a black background), and then in a brilliant flash of white, start all over again with the loading screen. It didn't appear to be going anywhere.

I was running the original firmware on my player, so I upgraded from v1.25 (BEv1.25_090119_XAA) to v2.03 (BEv2.03_090915_XAA) to see if that would fix the problem. It did not, which was disappointing. While that was loading, I did some googling to see if anyone else was experiencing the same issues. I found a post indicating the exact issue I did; it was his first non-playing disc and is also mine. He refers to another post regarding playback of the disc on a PS3.

So what was the solution? I had to disconnect the Blu-ray player's network connection. Yes, you read that right. A dumb-ass decision by some programmer making the content for this disc decided that getting something from the Internet during the menu load was a good idea, and apparently there is a failure with whatever it is trying to do. I didn't care enough to get a tcpdump of the traffic; I just wanted to watch the movie.

So if you didn't want to read the whole thing: disconnect the network connection from your player to get the Pineapple Express Blu-ray disc to work right.

To any Blu-ray content developers out there- please don't do things like this. You make yourself and this format look really bad.