Philips HTS3544

[kwebster]

I have a Philips HTS3544 Home Theatre System. It's a great unit for the price. My only complaint is that it seems to have trouble playing +R DL discs without freezing. This happens consistently. Moreover, I'm noticing that the freezing seems to happen after the second half of the DVD -- possibly after the layer break? There's nothing wrong with the DVD backup itself because it'll play in my standalone Magnavox unit just fine. I'm using Verbatim DVD+R DL's, so I doubt it's the media.

Does anyone have this unit and what's been your experience with it?

[yoda313]

How far into the movie does it do this? Is in the last half of the second half?

You might still want to encode short of the full dual layer capacity. It might be the same symptom some single layer discs have of having bad edges. If you don't encode the full disc and it still happens then perhaps its something else?

[kwebster]

Since I've been paying attention, I think it's happening during the second half. That's what led me to theorize that it had something to do with the layer break. But, if I take that disc and play it on my Magnavox DVD player, the disc plays flawlessly. I highly suspect that my Philips unit is either faulty or just hypersensitive to read errors.

I think I know what you're getting at by suggesting to encode short of the full DL capacity. I can say that I can't honestly remember if any of my SL backups experienced the same freezing symptoms. I'll have to verify that. It doesn't look like Philips is coming out with any more firmware revisions to fix the problem (if that's the problem, of course). I would hate to have to scrag the whole system on the account that it can't play my backups because it's a pretty awesome system for the price. I've got a girlfriend who bought a 3555. I'll see if the same thing happens on hers.