Sony PlayStation 3(PS3) Blue-ray issues. My PS3 began to have issue of periodically skipping during game play in early Oct. of 2009, at the time it would still play Blue-ray movies and DVD's. As about month time went on the issue of skipping slowly became more frequent and eventually turned to freezing during game play and the issue also began to occur while watching Blue-ray movies. Once a game or movie froze, if I left the game or movie alone after a minute or so I would get an error message on my TV telling me "Invalid Disc" with a series of numbers following the error message. 80029941 & 80029906 are some examples of the error codes I received (I had more but these are the ones I wrote down), what is interesting to me is that when I went on PS3 website and found a error code page I entered in one the the numbers I had received, 80029941. I received a message telling me that the 80029941 error code does not exist. The code I got from my PS3 does not exist for PlayStation, interesting. While on the PlayStation site I went to customer service and emailed them the issues I was having with my PS3, with in 5 min I had received an automatic response email providing me solutions to resolve the issue of my PS3 not playing games or Blue-ray movies. The most extreme measures suggested I would have to: -restore defaults and if that did not work I needed to reformat the drive. Nothing helped, all that was left for me was to ship my PS3 back to PlayStation to have them fix/provide me with a refurbished PS3, depended on who you talk to and read online, for a fee of $150, if your 1 year warranty has passed(another issue I have, 1 year warranty? Microsoft in 2007 extended their Xbox warranty to 3 years and in 2009 extended the warranty to include hardware problems).

I was so irritated by this whole situation I did some searches on the internet and I came to discover in mid Sept. of '09, PlayStation issued a firmware update v3.01 for PlayStation 3(PS3). This update was meant to add some better user features as well as patch/fix a freezing problem than many PS3 owners were experiencing for the game Uncharted, this was most likely the main reason for the firmware update. Essentially it was an update that was going to improve system stability during use of some PlayStation 3 format software. Well that did not happen, this is about the time I started to have issues of freezing while playing game and watching movies as previously mentioned. I also found out I was not alone. On one website Eurogamer http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/ps3-blu-ray-issue-not-firmware-related regarding this update, "Most, if not all, claim to have had no previous problem with their console, but having applied the firmware update discovered Blu-ray films and PS3 games froze and could not continue." On PlayStation.Blog, a site hosted by Playstation, there is even a section pertaining to Firmware Update 3.01 and the comments http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/09/ps3-firmware-update-v3-01-now-ava... of this section are very interesting to read. The first few pages or so PS3 users are praising PlayStation for creating a fix/patch to unfreeze the game, then about halfway through the comment pages the PS3 users comment on nothing but how disappointed they are with PlayStation and how PlayStation continues to claim that freezing of games and movies have nothing to do with the firmware update. So like me they will have to pay $150 for PlayStation to fix their console. I just got my PS3 back from PlayStation and for now I will not be installing the firmware update v3.1.