Faulty dvd

Nilrem

If it's playing in a store machine, and you've had a replacement that also doesn't work it's going to be one of three things.

1: faulty DVD player.
2: Faulty batch of DVD's - unusual but not unheard of, although normally a good retailer will become aware of it fairly quickly (they'll likely get a bunch of them back), and the distributor/publisher will issue a notice and depending on how many are affected may pull them all from sale.
3: A DVD that is incompatible with the specific model of player - this is pretty rare now, I can't think of it happening for new releases for a long time as the DVD spec is extremely well established as are authoring practices (back when DVD's were new some early players had issues with some releases that pushed the limit of the spec).

I've not seen issue 3 with DVD's for about 10 years, whilst I had a Blu-ray with issue 2 about three months ago and that seems to be the most common fault with new releases for me as I've had it happen a couple of dozen times*.

edit
If it's a Blu-ray in a blu-ray player it could be the player needs a firmware update, unlike DVD players BD units can/do occasionally need an update to play the latest release, and updating them can be as simple as connecting them to a spare port on your broadband router (or if the player has wireless telling that to connect to the wifi from your router) and going into the players menu and looking for the update firmware option.

*Although it's still rare, it's just my collection is fairly big and i've been collecting them for a long time:)

boo_star

Nilrem wrote: »

If it's playing in a store machine, and you've had a replacement that also doesn't work it's going to be one of three things.

1: faulty DVD player.
2: Faulty batch of DVD's - unusual but not unheard of, although normally a good retailer will become aware of it fairly quickly (they'll likely get a bunch of them back), and the distributor/publisher will issue a notice and depending on how many are affected may pull them all from sale.
3: A DVD that is incompatible with the specific model of player - this is pretty rare now, I can't think of it happening for new releases for a long time as the DVD spec is extremely well established as are authoring practices (back when DVD's were new some early players had issues with some releases that pushed the limit of the spec).

I've not seen issue 3 with DVD's for about 10 years, whilst I had a Blu-ray with issue 2 about three months ago and that seems to be the most common fault with new releases for me as I've had it happen a couple of dozen times*.

edit
If it's a Blu-ray in a blu-ray player it could be the player needs a firmware update, unlike DVD players BD units can/do occasionally need an update to play the latest release, and updating them can be as simple as connecting them to a spare port on your broadband router (or if the player has wireless telling that to connect to the wifi from your router) and going into the players menu and looking for the update firmware option.

*Although it's still rare, it's just my collection is fairly big and i've been collecting them for a long time:)

Blu-ray does have updateable firmware. DVD never has.

It'll be interesting what causes this particular movie to fail, but it can't be as simple as it being a Blu Ray, surely?

neilmcl

boo_star wrote: »

Blu-ray does have updateable firmware. DVD never has.

It'll be interesting what causes this particular movie to fail, but it can't be as simple as it being a Blu Ray, surely?

Quite possibly. I know if I gave my parents a blu-ray disc they wouldn't know the difference between it and a DVD and I'm sure there many others, of a certain age, will likely be the same.

Austine63

Thanks everyone for your input, its definitely a region 2 dvd not bluray, i may be a grandparent but not so old i cant tell the difference! So i guessing my player does not like this particular dvd. What to do now mmmm!!

Fosterdog

How old is your DVD player? The compatibility issue that Nilrem mentions is something I've seen countless times over the years although as Bluray has got more and more popular it has become quite rare with DVDs, last time I saw it was around three years ago so if your player is older than that it could be that. It was basically something done in the way DVDs were authored as a way of preventing piracy and as the "pirates" worked around each method they would come up with another as a preventative. It caused a lot of problems with DVD players not recognising the newest discs.

neilmcl

Buy a new (possibly blu-ray) player perhaps. Only if you're TV will support it though.

wealdroam

Austine63 wrote: »

Thanks everyone for your input, its definitely a region 2 dvd not bluray, i may be a grandparent but not so old i cant tell the difference! So i guessing my player does not like this particular dvd. What to do now mmmm!!

You could try a lens cleaner. Just one example.

pappa_golf

take grandchild to HMV to watch it ,

unholyangel

I haven't had to do it for a while but you can get codes (usually quite long ones) to open your dvd player so it doesn't check regions/plays discs that aren't "closed" (cant remember the right term for it).

If there are any issues with security checks on the dvds, that should help to bypass them.

If you have a computer, try that also as they too can read discs that won't work in some dvd players.

Nilrem

boo_star wrote: »

Blu-ray does have updateable firmware. DVD never has.

It'll be interesting what causes this particular movie to fail, but it can't be as simple as it being a Blu Ray, surely?

DVD players did have updateable firmware, not always user updateable (as in released to the public) though.
It was one of the ways they could be made market specific as the internal hardware was usually the same for different areas, and for example Australia passed a law that said that DVD players had to be region free, so rather than make a completely different model on the production line, IIRC they usually had them flashed to the unlocked firmware once in Australia by the distributor or retailer.

Many models never had an update after release, but I certainly remember updating several models for friends and family, as I was the one who had a decent internet connection, knew what I was doing and had a CD writer
It was also definitely a thing for some of the early DVD players to have an update as IIRC "The Matrix" caused issues with a lot of early models and a bunch of them ended up getting a retailer applied update.

The difference was that the BD specification called for an easy to use firmware update process in order to do things like revoke player decryption keys and update the keys the players used (and as a happy side effect add/update features on the player).
The DVD spec never called for that simple method, but it was a manufacturing*, logistical and after sales support requirement to have a way to update the firmware after manufacturing (done the old fashioned way, via a CD or DVD with the new firmware in most cases).


*Given a bug in the firmware might not be noticed until they'd shipped a large number leading to the situation where if your retailers/distributor couldn't update it quickly you would be facing shipping them back to a support/repair facility for something that can be done in minutes on site.