Panasonic RV-31 having trouble loading DVD+R disks

[trossin]

My 1.5 year old player about 2 months ago started having trouble loading DVD+R disks every now and then. Now every time I power up the machine and put a DVD+R into it it will respond with "NO PLAY" after spending 30 seconds wiggling the laser around. If I eject and reload the disk it will load and play just fine on the 2nd to 4th try. I do not have any problems with DVD+RW, studio DVD, VCD, CD, CD-R nor CD-RW.

I have also found that once the player has recognized a DVD then every DVD+R put into the machine will play on the first try until I power cycle the player.

The other symptom is that the machine is less tolerant of scratches and sometimes 1 to 2 times during a movie will draw a pixelated screen. If I back up and replay the section it plays fine.

Will paying $20 for a lens cleaning disk solve the problem or should I spend $9 more and buy a new player. My $40 crap player in the basement has not trouble with any media I throw at it.

I looked through the player comments and saw something about the menu button trick but I'm not sure what the deal is with that. If anyone has an idea of what is going on please let me know.

[trossin]

I'll answer my own post as I stumbled upon the solution to my problem.

The short answer is turn on the power with the power button. Never use the tray open button to turn on the player when trying to play a DVD+R.

I tried to figure out why all of a sudden the problem started happening and it seemed to start around the time that I found that I could turn the player on with the tray open button. For fun I turned on the player with the power switch then after the Welcome to DVD World message finished I opened the tray and put a DVD+R into the player. The player read the disk on the first try. I have been doing this for the last 3 months and have had absolutely no problems at all. The problem is completely gone. There seems to be a boot up firmware problem with this player. The person next to me at work tried to play a DVD+R in his Panasonic player and it would not read it. I told him of my problem and the same work-around fixed it for him as well. He has a different model but this seems to be a problem with the older Panasonic players.

[jambajaar]

Incredible but TRUE. The solution provided by Ted worked for me as well. Thanks a Lot, Ted!
- Bala