Some of the comments on Samsung US's user forum indicate that Samsung has finally realized that the problem is at their end. They said it would take three days to develop a fix for same. We'll see if that's the case.
There is no battery backup in the players. And their flash chip is a BGA which precludes replacement with hobby soldering gear (how many have highly modified toaster ovens, anyway?). One owner obtained a recent firmware image from Samsung, loaded it into a USB flash drive per Samsung's instructions, and tried to have his player update from that. But the re-booting cycling didn't find the drive so it was for naught. We will see if they find a solution that can actually return use to these players.
No, Samsung is no longer in the disk player business. But I'm sure they don't want the black eye of an event like this. Note the many responses here of those who say they will never buy any Samsung products again. Spending the software engineering time to fix this is far less expensive than potentially losing customers, warranty law or not. So my hopes are still in play.
