Hello everybody.
I've had this Panasonic DMR-E55 for about 4 years and been using it to record tv shows on DVD-RAM disks. It's always worked fine. Suddenly it decided it doesn't like my DVD-RAMs. I've got 4 of them (Panasonic brand) and it's doing the same with all of them: It vibrates, kind of "roars", and seems to be running really fast, although it does record okay. It records DVD-Rs just fine, quiet as always.
Update: It varies! Turns out I wasn't playing with all 4 of them, only 3. The fourth one had a recording on it. I played it today and it was fine... at first. After I did a little FF on it, when I played it at regular speed again, the machine had a slight vibration but not as much as with the other DVDs.
Also, I formatted one of them and afterward it was fine the first time I checked it. Formatted a second one with no improvement and when I put the first one I formatted back in the machine, it was bad again. Cleaning them makes no difference.
Also, it's not just when recording or playing. As long as the disk is in the machine, it has the vibration.
Also, I recorded a DVD-R last night. No problems recording it, and no problems playing it back today. Also no problems playing DVD+RWs that I make on the computer. (The Panasonic can't record on them.)
Update #2: After fooling around with DVD-RAMs for awhile, I put the DVD-R I was talking about back into the machine (the disk that worked perfectly) and the machine had trouble recognizing it. It was saying "unsupported disk type". After about 5 minutes of self-checks, power-cycles and eject-reinsert, it finally decided it was a good disk and it played it just fine. Afterwards, we watched the show that we had previously recorded on one of the DVD-RAMs and it was fine.

Anybody have any clues what's going on? Sounds like we might have a new DVD recorder in our near future.
Thanks