Store bought DVD movies rarely play

[Mark Girvan]

Hello everybody, thanks to any and all who respond. First things first, I am having problems with my brand new Samsung DVD player, a R-150 model. Many movies, legitimate purchased from stores such as Future Shop just do not work at all. Last night I borrowed five movies all Disney titles from a friend to show my daughter not one of them would work. However, many movies do work, there doesn't seem to be any pattern.

To make things even more confusing (or perhaps this is the clue to solve the problem) when I gave my brother two of the movies that would not play that I had purchased, he made copies of them from his computer and the copies play 100%!

There does not seem to be any actual problem with the unit, but are there some settings for compatibility I need to know about? I am very surprised about this situation, good old VHS tapes never caused problems. Sure they wore out and had issues, but I can buy an old video and at least it will play! As it stands now I'm afraid to actually purchase any movies because I may end up flushing my money down the toilet. Heck, I can't even rent movies as it stands.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. The unit is about 4 months old and very rarely used (go figure) so condition shouldn't be a factor. Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Cheers

[MOVIEGEEK]

That's very odd,are all of the DVD's region 1(NTSC)?
If they are I would buy another player.

[mats.hogberg]

That's exactly how my first DVD player behaved - after long service! Pretty soon, it started having troubles with DVD-R too, and within short only played CDs. It went to the recycle bin.
That a new player displays the same behaviour doesn't sound too good. If it's "brand new" as you say, take it back and get a new.

/Mats

[bendixG15]

The Samsung web site has 3 firmware updates for your machine.

May help if you updated. Good Luck

[Mark Girvan]

Thanks to all, so sorry for taking so long to answer your replies. I think I will most likely try to return the unit. The firmware update is rather annoying. I created the disc with the update from Samsung exactly as they instructed and the player couldn't read the disc I used! So now to make matters worse I have to spend money until I discover exactly what disc the machine likes.

Really hard to believe that players can be so difficult. I didn't buy the cheapest unit, it was a mid-priced unit and regardless these type of issues are absolutely ridiculous. As I said before, give me VHS anyday. At least it works. Thanks again everybody for your input.

Mark

[schematic2]

have you cleaned the laser? might be worth a try....memorex make a nifty cleaner with small brushed hanging from the disk...

[jman98]

Really hard to believe that players can be so difficult. I didn't buy the cheapest unit, it was a mid-priced unit and regardless these type of issues are absolutely ridiculous. As I said before, give me VHS anyday. At least it works. Thanks again everybody for your input.

Mark

It could be a lot of things. The quality control could be bad and there could be a lot of problems with the player. I have an old Philips DVP-642 and it has worked like a champ for me for over 3 years now, but plenty of people here had the same model player die on them after 3 months or less. It could be that the vast majority of this model is fine, but you got a lemon. It happens.

VHS players also had problems. I remember my family had one that developed serious problems after only a few months and had to be replaced.

[Krispy Kritter]

If it is new, there is no point spending any time at all trying to "fix" it. It should work out of the box, especially for commercial discs.

As for the firmware, those types of errors are almost always burn issues and NOT media related (especially for CD media).