issue with .exe firmware update for Sony blu ray player

That wouldn't help even if you could get it to work. You'd still end up with an exe file you can't run on the Mac. You either need to get someone with a Windows box to do it for you, or create a Windows bootcamp partition (assuming you're running on Intel hardware) to do it yourself.

I ended up doing what direwolf8 suggests. I never thought I would ever install Windows on my Mac Pro for any reason, but ended up installing it as a Boot Camp drive for one sole purpose. To update the firmware on the internal blu-ray drive I installed since the manufacturer doesn't make any Mac files to do that.

I still dont understand why someone posted this method using The Unarchiver on the internet and reckons it worked!

Not quite sure what you mean there. If the firmware was in a self extracting Windows .exe file, then the Unarchiver would have been able to save the compressed file out to the hard drive. So would the Stuffit Expander and a few others. But from there, you'd still need a way to write the firmware data to the drive.

I think we all assumed here that you were trying to the firmware on a blu-ray drive in, or attached to your Mac; not a set top box for playback on your TV.

The .exe file they're talking about contains the .iso (disk image) file needed to update your blu-ray player. To avoid having to install Windows to get the self the .iso file out of the self extracting .exe, they're having you use Unarchiver to do it.

The disk image for a BDP-S300 player is here. I selected Windows XP as the operating system, but I don't think it makes much difference since you're going to extract the .iso image from the download on your Mac.

Excerpt from Wikipedia: "An ISO image includes all the data of files contained on the archived CD/DVD, or any other disc format." Full article here.

The bad news. I tried both the Unarchiver and Stuffit Expander. Since I have the BDP-S350, I downloaded the firmware .exe file for that, along with the one you need. The Unarchiver couldn't open the .exe files at all. Stuffit did pull something out, but it was largely incomplete. I had to extract the files with the Mac booted into Windows XP. Then put the .iso images on a flash drive to copy them to the Mac desktop.

Once you are able to get the .iso disk image out of the .exe file, you need to get that data onto a CD. Double click the .iso image to mount it. A drive icon will appear on the desktop. Launch Disk Utility , select the mounted disk image and burn the contents of the .iso image to a CD.

Once that's done, insert the CD into the blu-ray player to update its firmware.

I have now succesfully upgraded the firmware,...

Excellent, me too! My player was actually quite a ways back on the firmware, so this should make a pretty substantial improvement in load times for blu-ray disks.

Maybe the person that provided the steps never actually tried them?

Hard to say. Sure sounds like he did, but since it obviously doesn't work, why would he say it does?

I do agree with his griping about Sony's distribution, though. Why put the .iso image into an .exe file in the first place? And why a separate .exe file for every version of Windows when the data in each .exe file is the same!? Any Windows OS can open any .exe file. There was zero purpose in creating so many.

I thought at first they put it into a self expanding archive because it included more than just the .iso file, like installation instructions. But no, it's just the .iso file, so .exe files were pointless. They could have saved themselves a lot of time by just putting the .iso file in one .zip file, or just leaving it as is. Then anyone could download and use it no matter their OS. You'd swear someone at Sony deliberately went out of their way to make the process as convoluted as possible.

Same issue. THere is a way to order a Mac Compatible DVD/CD with the firmware update from the support website Firmware update page. It took about 5 days for it to arrive and it worked as advertised, ie put DVD in, let it update (for about 20 minutes) then continued.

Sony did not charge for the DVD firmware on disc option.

Sony did not charge for the DVD firmware on disc option.

Thanks for the information, Clement. That's good to know. Very nice of Sony not to charge anything for it.