Hell and Back with the Panny DMP-BD80 Blue Ray Player
My wife brought home “Drag Me to Hell” – a silly horror movie starring er well no one in particular except the stupid “Mac guy” from the TV ads. Bowl of popcorn in hand, beer sitting next to me, I’m ready to watch this flick. In goes the Blue Ray disk into my Panny DMP-BD80 and after getting thru all the menus, pffffftttt…nuttin. WTF? I tried without any luck for about 20 minutes. Finally I noticed a little popup screen that said something about “this might not work if you don’t have the latest player firmware”. Ugh – not good. Anyway enough of that for the night, I had “V” on the DVR so we watched that instead.
Panny DMP-BD80 – Going down to…
That popup got me thinking. Maybe I should update the player’s firmware. A couple of Google searches found this page:
http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/bd/download/bd80/bd80_na.html
Sweet – Panny’s got it going. Ok this looks easy. I follow the directions (I actually had to dig up a blank CD-R), get the CD in the drive restart the player and….ugh. Its not working. It gets about half-way thru, stops, and ejects the disk, and the screen just says “upd ing”. Oh nooo! I google…nuttin…I check the Panny site…no help. I try turning off the unit and back on again and it just wants a disk to eat. Well that’s just great. $200 down the crapper I’m thinking. Argh.
After a lot of searching I noticed several comments about ISO formats and re-burning the disk because of corruption, and eventually connecting the player to the internet as the only possible way to get this to work, but no concrete solutions. The ISO comments seemed funny/odd to me – all the instructions said was to decompress the firmware and burn it to a CD-R.
Panny DMP-BD80 – Coming back…
The brain is going now – and sure enough they forget to tell you “as an ISO file!”. Duh. That’s an important detail to leave out.
So here’s the procedure I used.
- Grab ImgBurn – a great freeware CD burning package.
- Take the downloaded .exe file and extract it to your hard drive
- Startup ImgBurn and select the “Create Image file from files/folder”
- Run the “write image file to disk” and select the image file you just created.
- Stick that into the BD-80 player and follow the Panny instructions.
That worked – sweet – I had two beers after that to celebrate not destroying my player. 🙂
The firmware really does improve the player too – and yes that movie magically worked after the update. Too bad it is a really stupid movie…the Mac guy survives unscathed which was a real disappointment.
Couldn’t you just update the player online. why go through the entire process of downloading and burning discs?
Sure I guess…if I wanted to yank the unit out of my entertainment center, move it to where I have a fixed line ethernet connection and a monitor to display “stuff” I Guess I could have done that.
Or if Panasonic has just said that the CD method was not reliable and/or not documented well I would have taken that approach.
It seemed much easier to just download, burn, and good to go. If the instructions from Panny were right, it would have been.
Thanks for his posting. I made the same ‘mistake’ when trying to update the firmware. This worked like a gem. Stoopid “Drag Me to Hell” Blu ray.
WOW you just saved my BD-80. I had Blu ray that wouldn’t play so I too downloaded the update – easier than moving everything. Tried 2 days to update and ended up with a paper weight. Burned update with Win 7 that was wrong needs to be ISO-9660. Down load ImgBurn good program but still no work. Found this article and burned image to hard drive then burned image to CD-R and 5 minutes later it worked! At least I can watch The Expendables in Blu ray now. Thanks again even a year later this worked. 🙂
That’s great! Glad you found it as useful as I did.