DVD Player Says "No Disk" with certain DVD's

[AD13]

We have had our Pioneer DVD player for a few years now and never had any problems with it playing DVD's that weren't horribly scratched. It has worked like a champ for a long time and still works with all the DVD's we have in our home collection and most that we rent from Netflix. However, recently we have found 3 DVD's that will not play at all in our player. When we put them in, you can hear it trying to load it like it does with all DVD's, but it just keeps saying "loading" and then says "no disk." We have never run into this problem until a couple months ago.

We have found 3 DVD titles so far that it will not play: Avatar, The Wizard of Oz (new 75th anniversary edition that came out last year), and Donnie Darko (which is strange because this title came out in 2003 and I got it through Netflix. I reported it as damaged and they sent me another and it was pristine, no scratches or anything and it also would not play and said No Disk.)

The Avatar DVD we also got through Netflix and it played just fine on our other DVD player, a cheapie Sylvania DVD and VHS player we bought about 5 years ago for the kids' TV/play room.

All of these titles will also play fine on our IMac computer. I didn't try the Wizard of Oz or Donnie Darko on the cheapie Sylvania, just instantly went to the IMac to watch them.

I just got Sherlock Holmes through Netflix and it is a brand new title that came out just this year and it plays perfectly on the Pioneer that seems to be having trouble with the three disks I mentioned.

I am wondering if this problem is due to some new copyright protection or new format issue that is being used on some DVD's and not others due to the fact that our Pioneer plays most other DVD's just fine. If this is the case, is there anything I can look for on DVD cases before buying or renting them that would tell me that it won't work in my player?

I'm also wondering since we have just run into this problem very recently with a couple newer DVD's (with the exception of the Donnie Darko) if we will start having this problem more and more to the point where we will be forced to buy a new DVD player. It seems a bit of a waste since ours really isn't "broken."

However, if it turns out that this is a problem that we will be seeing much more of in the near future, I'd like to know so that we can plan on saving up to buy a new DVD player (possibly a blue ray that also will play our old DVD's in our collection, though I've heard some bad things about blue ray like the blue ray disks are much more fragile and apt to scratch than regular DVD's and that there have been compatibility issues with certain newer movies even in the blue ray format.) If it comes down to that, I'd also like suggestions on a reasonably priced DVD or blue ray player that will also play DVD's that will have few if any problems with whatever it is that's causing some DVD's to not play in our player now.

Thanks for any info!

[jagabo]

The only copy protection mechanism built into the DVD spec is the CSS encryption. Since that was cracked long ago the studios spend a lot of time looking for tricks that will thwart the copying programs but leave the disc playable in normal DVD players. They never succeed in thwarting the copying programs for long. But they occasionally go too far and create discs that don't play in some players.

[[_chef_]]

Such overproteced DVDs should be banned as unDVDs too.

[Annihlator]

Hello,
If you have acces to a windows-based PC, i'd like to advise you to go to http://www.mscience.com/free.html and download one or both of the following two programs: "DVDInfo" and "DVDIdentifier" These two pieces of software usually are able to identify all sorts of info concerning DVD's like regions info, booktype, etc. Try comparing the non-working disks to the working disk and check if there's any differences.

You can also post the info extracted from those disks if you wish, perhaps I or someone else may know a solution

In example: I had the same issues with a regular Donny Darko dvd on our Bose Lifestyle system, imaging the disk as an .iso and burning it again under regular settings solved the problem in our case.

Tom.