Which version of the firmware are you using?

The firmware on my Sony S-350 has just been updated. A simple concept for some folk but incomprehensible to the many who grew up with VHS (or Betamax) or even early DVD players. Back in those happy days, towards the end of the last century, you bought a consumer electronics device and whether it worked or didn't, you were pretty much stuck with what you had. There was no program of constant updates over the internet, if it was broken when they made it, it was broken when you used it.

I've just been wrestling with a Sony Lasermax player, trying to get audio and video from ten Laservision discs that I produced in 1985 and turn it into usable digital data. All those frustrations that I remember from 20+ years ago came back to haunt me. The fact is that you could do nothing without the remote (with a set of new batteries), that the SCART socket on the back is only partially configured, that it is a struggle to get what now seem to be giant discs in and out of a slot. What little firmware it had inside the box was set in silicon at the time of manufacture and updates involved buying the latest generation player.

Despite the clunky feel of Laserdisc it looked and sounded (with digital ausio) pretty good. I remember being told that DVD was an upstart, that it would never take over from LV since the sound and picture quality just wasn't good enough. Well that argument was soon lost and at least the DVD player had a small amount of intelligence and memory inside it. Too little memory, it turned out, even when compared with the short-lived CD-i format, and as a result the layer break was (is) usually far from seamless.

So I was very pleased when my new upscaling Philips DVD player proved to be a star on the layer break stage. Problem discs were played without interruption and the picture quality at 1080i demonstrated just what a good MPEG-2 encoder could do at 8 Mbps. It was also the first DVD player that I had owned that benefited from consumer updates to the firmware. A persistent bug vanished after the first of these updates and things could only get better.

Which they did with the move to the S-350. From an AV point of view, anyway. Great pictures and sound from both BD and DVD but s l o w, s l o w, s l o w to load and search. Then there was the fact that previously perfect DVDs started to reveal problems that had not been there before. What could have been logic errors in menus appeared, were it not for the fact that only the S-350 showed them. Worst of all, the delay at the layer break on some DVD-9s was more of a still than a momentary freeze frame.

A firmware update seemed to be the answer - though finding it on the Sony support site was far from easy. Download a disc image, burn it to CD, insert into player, wait 25 minutes and voila! Some of the problems had been resolved. The layer change it still obtrusive but the menu bug is gone and the player may be slightly more responsive.

Apart from the obvious question "Why is a 2008 player less able to handle the layer break than a Panasonic A100 designed in 1996?", how many consumers even know that revised firmware is available? DVD was designed as a simple CE product - put the disc in and play. The latest low-power computers with an optical drive, packaged as Blu-ray, are a far cry from the basic rule of Consumer Electronics - Keep It Simple Stupid.

And now I'm off to upgrade the firmware on the toaster.