TL;DR - I did something and then other some other things happened.

So last night I knocked on my Panasonic UB40 UB-820 to watch a disc. It comes up with a notification that a v1.69 firmware update is available.

My player was on v1.60 but is also running custom firmware due to the modchip I installed. Anyway, I checked the modchip documentation and it says doing a network update is fine, just don't update manually via USB as it will disable all the lovely work the modchip does for you and you'll need to reinstall it.

Anyway, I forget if I mentioned it before but I bought the SDBD's of Steven Spielberg's Above Average Entertaining Stories from Turbine in Germany. The aul UB-820 wouldn't play them correctly. It just played audio but no picture. Which is odd as Cyber City Oedo 808 (remember that anime with the awesome dub noone else likes and UK-only whopper soundtrack? ) is an SDBD and encoded similarly to the Steven Spielberg's These Are Alright Actually, Stories discs. Cyber City discs play just fine, so I contacted Turbine and ended up in a conversation with one of their folks who authors Turbine discs. He was stumped as to why the discs didn't work and ended up refunding me. He said it's possibly the player at fault but contacting Panasonic would likely not be worth it as they probably wouldn't fix it based off of one person mentioning it. This all happened around 6 months ago maybe, I forget.

Well it turns out that the v1.69 firmware has fixed the issue! I can now play both SDBD's of Steven Speilberg's Reasonably Entertaining Yet Utterly Far Fetched Stories in all their 4:3 'HD' goodness! No idea if Panasonic were aware of the issue in their own tests or customer feedback, but I'm not complaining.

For the record I watched one episode last night. It was about a magician who finds a deck of cards that revive his career,but all is not well for long... It was an amazing story. I was entertained. I love firmware updates that actually fix things. I love my Panasonic UB-820.

I remember a firmware update fixed something for me once…can’t remember what precisely.

The other 10,000 times I’ve done it there was no obviously benefit. It was just, “Oh my, we sold a few more units in this family and now have the budget to fix some, but not all (haha) of the issues this half baked thing had when we shipped it.”

Oh I though this image was him apologizing for remaking West Side Story.....

My only familiarity with Amazing Stories is that LucasArts's The Dig started as an idea Spielberg had for an episode and decided to give (then) Lucasfilm Games instead. An interesting mix of positive and negative first impression, in other words.
Don't forget the "Oh s**t oh f**k half of our players are mining crypto for the mob we need to fix this vulnerability now" updates.