Lite On DH203S Blu Ray e9240f

[hawbaked]

I think the problem with Blu Ray experienced by many is not the MediaSmart software, but rather the DH203S drive.  I replaced that drive in one of my brand new e9240f machines with an LG drive, and now I can play Blu Ray.  Still a little hard to navigate the menus, but at least now the drive does not fail when I eject a disk and insert another one.  Before I changed the drive, that action would cause a fatal RAID error and a cold restart was required to get the machine working again.

I emailed Lite On and they told me that any firmware upgrade would have to come through HP.  So how about it HP?  Are you finally going to solve this problem?  Like many others, I bought this machine (in fact two of them) to use as a home theater.  This Blu Ray issue is very annoying.

[davidhardy]

Same problem and am on my second e9240f because of it. I got this to be a multimedia machine and am disappointed about the bluray issue.

You bought a replacement drive? May I ask how much that was or where you got it? I hate to open up the box and do a switch on a new machine but it's that or send it back I guess...

Has HP recognized it is a firmware glitch with the drive?

[hawbaked]

I installed that Dec. 22 patch and now it seems to be working better.  But then I see they discovered something wrong with the patch, possibly withdrew it, and are working on another.  The info is in another thread on this list.

I bought a Blu-ray drive at Best Buy.  Very hard to find.  It was an LG.  About $120.  The LG web site had a firmware update.  Looks like this Blu-ray standard is not as settled as I would like it to be.  It's evolving.

All I know is, out of the box, these e9240fs would not play a Blu-ray.  I installed the LG drive and a trial copy of PowerDVD 9.  No problem.  Then I installed the October MediaSmart patch, with the original drive, and it seemed to help.  Then I installed the Dec. 22 patch.  That seemed to help too, but then it quit, and now it seems to be working better.  I just don't have a good feeling that they have really tracked down this problem yet.  One day it will play, and the next day it won't.

I only have a few Blu-ray titles.  I have not tried a standard DVD yet.  The software is hard to use.  It tells you the mouse will not work.  Then says to push play, but there is no play.  Push it with what?  And then the sub menu comes up, but if you try to use the mouse, the chapter menu jumps up and you can't click on the play sub menu.  MediaSmart DVD just is not user friendly in my observations.  Very unfriendly user interface.

Sorry I could not help more.  But it does seem HP is working on it, so I will just have to wait and see what they release.  I may just buy the CyberLink software, although it's not in the budget right now.  Maybe next month.  I can't really tell if it is a Lite On DVD firmware problem or a MediaSmart software problem.  What I need to do is test the LG drive with the MediaSmart software, see what happens.  Might get to that later this evening.

[hawbaked]

Applying the Oct. and Dec. MediaSmart patches to the e9240f did not solve the Blu-ray issues (disk not recognized, RAID failure, disk gone from devices, etc).

Replacing the Lite On DH203S with a current LG Blu-ray drive resolved all those issues.  But it did create two new issues.

About every four minutes the screen will go black for about 3 seconds.

When jumping back and forth between chapters, or pausing and restarting, audio will occasionally fail, i.e. no audio.

[davidhardy]

Thanks so much for the reply. Actually out of the box Blurays played for a week or so then not at all. C'est la vie. The computer itself was a budget stretch: adding another drive to play blurays when I bought the computer to play blurays is not so cool. Once again thanks for the follow up.

[hawbaked]

Correction:  It is a model Lite On DH-403S.

Still waiting for some help from HP.  Can't play Blu-Ray.

[davidhardy]

The very last suggestion by HP help was to download the cyberlink player trial. It did not recognize the BD or play the disk I had played (before it stopped working) but did recognize and play one  blockbuster bluray movie: weird. What I don't get is that the second d9240f I got played stuff out of the box then just stopped altogether after doing all the steps then works with another player on a random disk. I guess the cyberlink player is good for 30 days of watching...