SonyUBP-X800M2 4K UHD Blu-ray Disc Player

I love this model 4k blu ray player. I keep the old one set to Region A discs, of course. Perhaps i will try to set Region B sometime. Really happy with its performance (about 1 year of use so far).

Works great

I have to say that I have several of the Sony Blue Ray players and haven’t had any issues with them playing any DVD that I’ve thrown at them. This UHD player is brand new. I hooked it up and played Top Gun Maverick UHD (Brand new disc). It played all the way until Maverick and Rooster were going to steal the F-14… All of the sudden, it stalls. Picture freezes. I go back a chapter and it freezes when Maverick is dodging the attack helicopter. Now this is a new player and a new disc. Never been played. This is why I’m on the fence and cannot leave a 5 star review. I will watch a few more UHD dvd’s (all brand new-never opened) and I’ll see if they play through without freezing. I may even remove a star or 2 if they do freeze.

I've had the UBP-X800M2 for about 8 months now. I don't care about most of the advanced features. What I wanted was a Blu-Ray that would play regular Blu-Ray, 4K Blu-ray, DVD, and CD, and do so reliably. That's all I wanted, and I didn't think that these expectations were unreasonable, but this player is garbage. I've had trouble with it from the start. Often, after playing a regular DVD, it would not play Blu-Ray. I've seen this a number of times, but it doesn't always happen. On some occasions the controls on the remote that are supposed to allow you to frame-by-frame in reverse did not work, and instead of the correct behavior, the player simply played in reverse in normal 1x speed. On numerous occasions the digital audio signal output at the digital/coaxial jack was incorrect. There was sound, and you could even identify the song or track, but the sound was nevertheless messed up to the point that this had to be the result of the player incorrectly applying some kind of audio processing that I had not selected in the setup and that it was not supposed to apply. The setup screens, by the way, are horrific, and so is the manual. It is nothing more than a guessing game as to what the various settings actually do. And I really do mean a guessing game, because there is nowhere near enough information in that little skinny manual for anything to be explained properly. Worst of all is that it randomly goes into a state where it does not respond to the front buttons or the remote control. Bricked, in other words. It does this randomly and all too often. Whenever this happens I have move some stuff around and then reach around the back of my AV rack to unplug the cord. Very annoying. It should never necessary to do this, with any home electronics equipment. For any piece of home electronics equipment that has this problem, the cause of the problem is that the firmware has taken a walk through the woods, so to speak. The firmware has errors of a type where the content of RAM is randomly overwritten with random whatever. This is always, always the reason when something behaves this way. And this is something that the manufacturers know. When you unplug it and plug it back it, the content of RAM is refreshed from the non-volatile flash. This has to be done when, and only when, the content of RAM has become corrupt due to a logic error in the firmware. It is unstable, to use a popular word that describes lousy software of this sort. To a C programmer, this kind of behavior is indicative of a pointer being written with an address that it isn't supposed to contain. This is when the whole thing goes downhill. Before that happens, there can be anomalous behavior, but it is when one of the anomalous behaviors does an erroneous write to a location used as a pointer for subsequent memory writes, that it rapidly goes downhill. Just for grins I checked in the manual to see if there was anything in the troubleshooting for what to do when it does not respond to the front buttons or the remote. I found it right at the very top of the troubleshooting list, under Power, right at the top. Why is this under "power"? For no reason other than the fact that you have to cycle the power to force it to reboot. The troubleshooting steps say to turn it off and unplug, to wait for 2 minutes and then plug it back in. The fact that they put this in the manual reveals that they know that the firmware is junk and that they don't really care. If they cared, they would fix it. There is no telling who wrote the firmware. Most likely, Sony bought some junk software that was hobbled together by some team of self-taught programmers located somewhere in China, or elsewhere in that general region of the world. If they are going to do this kind of thing, and behave this irresponsibly, the least they could do is place a rest button on the front of thing so that it would be easy to do and you wouldn't have to pull out your speakers and a few other things to access the power strip where it is plugged in. I suppose that the solution is for me to install an inline power switch in the power cord right at the back of it. That will make it easier to tolerate, but this isn't an acceptable solution. The only fully acceptable solution is for Sony to acknowledge that the firmware is garbage and have someone fix. There are any number of good software outfits in the USA that develop embedded software including the OS and that do it reliably, following standard methods for developing reliable software. But Sony would never want to do that, because they would have to pay for it, whereas the people that actually wrote this software probably did it for next to nothing. And that's the bottom line. It is a garbage product because Sony wanted to save money on the software cost and paid some unknown persons a few dollars to write some garbage software that works some of the time but for very long before you have to reboot it by cycling the power. The thing that I find most remarkable about this is that the company that operates this way, Sony, is still a highly respected manufacturer of consumer electronics equipment. Sony, why don't you pay someone to rewrite that junk software for you?