Complaints about devices caught in an endless startup boot loop began to appear on various internet discussion boards, and videos documenting the device failure appeared on YouTube.

To fix the issue, Samsung eventually advised customers to return their inoperable video players for repairs. There is no software fix.

"We are aware of the boot loop issue that appeared on certain 2015 Samsung Blu-Ray players and are offering free mail-in repairs to customers who have been impacted", a representative of the mega-manufacturer said in a Samsung forum post.

It now appears that the failure was caused by an XML file downloaded by the network-connected devices from Samsung servers during periodic logging policy checks.

This file, when fetched and saved to the device's flash storage and processed by the equipment, crashed the system software and force a reboot.

Upon reboot, the player parsed the XML file again from its flash storage, crashed and rebooted again. Thus leaving it forever broken.