I recently built a new computer (more to come). This awesome beast is so heavily overspecced there’s not much you can throw at it that would make it have a hard day. That is, unless you’re a publishing studio called Universal.

As part of my new setup I have a Blu-Ray drive – any self respecting videophile has one of these. This drive is a Samsung SH-B123L (which can also identify itself as a TSSTcorpDVDWBD) and has the newest available firmware (SB03 – December 2010) which was upgraded from the non-obvious site SamsungODD. In conjunction with Cyberlink PowerDVD 10 Ultra 3D Mark II I have watched about 20 Blu-Rays on this new system.

And so it came to pass that recently I received a copy of Despicable Me on Blu-Ray. Does it play? No. After a few seconds the Universal logo plays, as you’d expect. Then, a spinning loading Universal logo sits on the screen. The one time I left it on we got to 13 minutes before an advert played which thanked me for supporting the industry and paying for the film. Then the loading logo came back. Another 10 minutes and I gave up.

Clearly the problem here is the Blu-Ray drive. It can’t play the disc. But that problem is itself caused by Universal who have added a new type of DRM that the drive does not understand. As it stands I have purchased a £16 product that I cannot watch – let’s not forget that I could easily download this film through bittorrent – for free – and watch it with ease.

This is the problem with the media industry, forever penalising the very hands that feed it. Pirate copies of films simply don’t suffer from these problems and save five or more minutes of your life every time you watch a disc, because they don’t come with the pointless copyright warnings (pointless because if you’re going to copy it, you’re going to copy it).

I have sent emails to Universal (whose first reply told me my computer may not have enough memory – I think 24GB is quite enough), posted an entry in the Samsung section of Cnet and contacted eBuyer, the supplier of the drive in question.

Who should be billed for my wasted time here? Universal for using DRM that my drive cannot understand, Samsung for not updating their firmware fast enough or eBuyer for distributing a new drive that is already out of date?