DVD drive plays CD's, not DVD's

[Kevin Low]

Hey there,

I have a DVD/CDR drive on my one-year old laptop. It was playing
DVD's fine a week ago, but yesterday when I tried to run a DVD, it
wouldn't play it. In fact, it wouldn't play any of my DVD's anymore.
However, it does play music CD's and DVD's with PCM audio.

It's hard to be specific because there's no error messages.
Basically, it sounds like it reads the DVD, then stops, then reads,
then stops, etc. The access light keeps flashing, and it freezes up
Windows Media Player while nothing happens when I hit play in WinDVD.
These problems go away when I eject the disc.

My laptop is a Toshiba Satellite 2450, 2.4 ghz w/ Windows XP. It uses
a Matshita UDJA740 DVD/CD drive.

If any of you might know what's going on, that would be awesome. My
laptop's from Canada, but I'm in Japan right now and last time I sent
it out for maintenance from here, it took two months to get back. So
I'm kinda reluctant to send it out again.

Thanks in advance!
Kevin

 

[Grinder]

Hey there,

I have a DVD/CDR drive on my one-year old laptop. It was playing
DVD's fine a week ago, but yesterday when I tried to run a DVD, it
wouldn't play it. In fact, it wouldn't play any of my DVD's anymore.
However, it does play music CD's and DVD's with PCM audio.

It's hard to be specific because there's no error messages.
Basically, it sounds like it reads the DVD, then stops, then reads,
then stops, etc. The access light keeps flashing, and it freezes up
Windows Media Player while nothing happens when I hit play in WinDVD.
These problems go away when I eject the disc.

My laptop is a Toshiba Satellite 2450, 2.4 ghz w/ Windows XP. It uses
a Matshita UDJA740 DVD/CD drive.

If any of you might know what's going on, that would be awesome. My
laptop's from Canada, but I'm in Japan right now and last time I sent
it out for maintenance from here, it took two months to get back. So
I'm kinda reluctant to send it out again.

Have you watched a commercially produced DVD in the meantime? I've
noticed that if I permit DVD's to autoplay in my DVD-RW, it will
eventually cause that player to fail in the manner you describe. I
suspect it is some form of copy protection that does not work properly,
but have no hard facts.

 

[Kevin Low]

Have you watched a commercially produced DVD in the meantime? I've

noticed that if I permit DVD's to autoplay in my DVD-RW, it will
eventually cause that player to fail in the manner you describe. I
suspect it is some form of copy protection that does not work properly,
but have no hard facts.

Thanks for the info. Actually, I own only commercially produced
DVD's. I've tried several DVD's, including Finding Nemo which has
been working for almost a year, and I got the same problem. I was
able to get one DVD working last night, but the seek time was horrible
(3 minutes when I clicked on a menu button), and the next time I put
it in, it wouldn't run again. So maybe my drive's copy protection
detector is malfunctioning?

 

[Grinder]

Thanks for the info. Actually, I own only commercially produced
DVD's. I've tried several DVD's, including Finding Nemo which has
been working for almost a year, and I got the same problem. I was
able to get one DVD working last night, but the seek time was horrible
(3 minutes when I clicked on a menu button), and the next time I put
it in, it wouldn't run again. So maybe my drive's copy protection
detector is malfunctioning?

I probably wasn't clear enough in my speculations. I'm wondering if
there isn't some sneaky sort of copy protection being installed from one
of those commercial DVDs that is messing up your system.

MediaMax has a copy protection scheme for audio CD's that basically
installs a device driver to mess with any audio ripper you might use --
I'm postulating that a similar weasel might be on the lose for DVDs.

I did look around a bit for a discussion of this problem, but could not
find anything. Sorry. All I can say for sure is that my DVD-RW stopped
functioning after watching two commercial (rental) DVDs, on what was a
newly installed Win2000 system. A reinstall of the OS and it worked
again. Go figure.

If you can determine which DVDs you watched after it was working, and
before it stopped, you can take a look at the AUTORUN.INFs on those
DVDs. That could give you a clue as to what might have been installed,
and lead you to resources on how to uninstall it. Then again, perhaps
this is too much to invest in my speculations.