DVD plays well on one machine but not on others

[pfloyd_mtl]

This might have been answered elsewhere but I couldn't find it on this forum so here goes...

My parents came back from Thailand with a DVD for an excursion they did out there. They have a Panasonic RV-32 at home and this player cannot load the DVD at all.

I now have the DVD at home and I can play it on my PC (LG DVD-ROM) and also on my Toshiba SD-1400 portable player. When I try to play it on either my Panasonic RV-31 or RV-32 (I have both) I get the same error as the RV-32 that they have.

Thinking it was because of the media, I made a backup using DVDShrink on Maxell media and I get the same errors.

Could it be because of the way the content was initially created? Maybe the VOBs aren't configured appropriately for the Panasonic players? Region settings aren't the problem since I have players that can read the DVD.

Any help on this matter would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[mats.hogberg]

Wrong TV system (PAL/NTSC)?

/Mats

[pfloyd_mtl]

Hmmm, would that mean that the Panasonic players are sensitive to that information but the Toshiba player doesn't care about it? How would I know the current setting for that particular DVD? Is that someting that DVDShrink handles to change the TV settings?

[mats.hogberg]

No, PAL/NTSC conversions isn't a trivial task - there are some guides on the subject tho...

/Mats

[ebenton]

On the other hand, the RV-32 on the DVD player list to the left doesn't look like that great of a player (I didn't check the RV-31). Although the number of contributors to the list is not exactly comprehensive, it seems to have problems with many different brands of disk.
It could be that the RV-32 and RV-31 are simply inferior players.
Now watch, there will all kinds of RV-31/32 users saying how great their player its, how it plays everything they throw at it, etc. etc.
When I say inferior, it's not a slam on anyone who has one that thinks they're great. One of the problems with inferior, mass-produced things is inconsistency between one final product and another.
One example of this is infereior blank disks. Everything else being the same, someone can buy a 100-disk spindle of an inferior disk and make no coasters with them. Then they can buy another 100-disk spindle of the same disks (same media code, same everything) and get mostly coasters.
Hardware can be the same way.

[neomaine]

pfloyd_mtl,

Have you tried using a different buringing app besides shrink? How about using DVDDecrypter in iso read/write?

What's the error you get on the player? Or, is it playing but getting garbage (start/stop/macroblocks/screaching) on the TV?

[greymalkin]

is this DVD+R or DVD-R? You might want to try burning to the other and see if that works.