new acer laptop

[ian4355]

Hi, I've got a Billy Wilder box set, region 1, which I used to watch quite happily on my old desktop. Now I have a new Acer laptop with a Matshita drive and I cannot think of what to do to make these discs playable; tried DVD Region+CSS Free and AnyDVD to no avail; tried flashing firmware software but it came up with errors!
Hope someone can help.

[jman98]

Are these discs DVDs or BluRays? This is actually critical. We've had people post here who bought a new laptop and they post about how they can't play their BluRays and we look into it and find out that they don't have a BluRay drive on the laptop. I know you said "region 1" which should mean DVD, but I cannot assume you are using the right term. BluRay regions are A, B and C and I have seen people refer to them as 1, 2 and 3.

Assuming they are DVDs, try VLC. It ignores region codes. The programs you listed should have worked for DVDs so you might list the errors you got. Can you play ANY DVDs at all on the laptop? Drives do go bad over time and it could be that your drive is giving out.

[ian4355]

jman98, thanks for answering

these are dvds
tried VLC (in fact, it is my media player of choice), it didn't like them at all
R2 dvds play just fine (I did mention the laptop is new!)
I'll try running the flashing programs again to see (and post) the errors

[ian4355]

jman98
Here you go:-

Windows dumper for Matshita DVD drives V1.01 by ala42, based on ben11's dump_matshita

Enter the drive letter of the Matshita drive to backup the firmware: d
You have selected the source drive d

dump_matshita V 0.1
Appear to have a matshita device MATSHITADVD-RAM UJ8B0AW 1.00
dump 1
change_vendor_mode: rc -2 tries 101
error during attempt to read memory from device \\.\d:

Press any key to continue . . .

[Moontrash]

there's a few simple ways to work around this

1. Try other discs from another set or a single retail and see if that works. If it does then most likely its the drive itself.

2. If you have access to an external dvd player/burner then plug it into your USB port and see if that works...If it does...you have a drive problem.

External Dvd Drive...If it turns out to be the built in drive then you can probably contact Acer to get a replacement. If you can't then the exteral route isn't a bad way to go. They're pretty cheap also.

[jman98]

You may have botched the firmware flash. It seems that your issue is region control related based on the "rc -2 tries 101" message, although I cannot confirm that. You may have to contact the vendor and play dumb and see if you can get a new drive. I don't recommend doing firmware flashes unless you have a critical problem that MUST be fixed by a firmware update. There is always some risk of disaster when you do this.

[ian4355]

First, thanks for helping but second, honestly guys, there's nothing wrong with the drive (apart from the fact it's a Matshita!). It still plays Region 2 and my home-made discs (ConvertX; DVDShrink etc) just fine.