I have a customer whose house i stopped by and is having problems playing dvds. After much testing, i narrowed it down to only their Disney DVDs that wont play in certain machines.

They have a Denon DVD 2500 in one room that won't play any of these discs. A Mitsubishi 6020 that only plays about half of them and an old Panasonic that plays them all with no problems.

I searched the back of the CD covers and couldn't find any info about the disc that would lead me to any problems.
All the discs were bought from BestBuy.
Any body have any insight as to what the problem can be?

TIA

Mike

Disney DVDs can sometimes be "difficult" since they tended to push the spec or be slightly higher than spec (in terms of features, exact capabilities used, etc.)

Do you have access to a Sony DVD you can try them on to make sure it's not an actual disc problem? I only say Sony as I have used 5 of 'em over the years with a mountain of Disney DVDs and had no trouble whatsoever (for the first 2 or 3 years when DVDs came out, many players had trouble with a lot of DVDs, Disney being a notorious example).

I don't use sony and inform customers to avoid them at all costs. I do have an old Panasonic at home, same model as theirs that they don't have problems with. I've never run into any problems unless the disc is an rw.
Does Disney use a different type of disc? This seems extremely odd to me since i have a big family with plenty of kids and a large clientele base and have never heard of this problem.
I can easily upgrade them to a newer top of the line model, as they are good customers who will pay whatever they need to have everything work but this seems extremely odd that they are only Disney discs. Is there some type of different encoding on these disks?

Actually, I had a Sony that did not play these well at all. Although it was old and eventually stopped playing anything well, it's been replaced. My Denon 2900 is perfect.

Have you tried LOTR discs? Esp the EE versions? These also have a high rate of difficulty. I agree with Daniel, many discs these days are pushing the envelope. Higher bitrates, more data squeezed onto each layer, etc. And, of course, some discs have authoring problems that some players choke on.

First thing is to clean them. Run them under hot water. New discs sometimes have something on them, it seems. Fine dust or residue or something. Or they could be dirty from kids if they aren't new.

A big close-minded, don't you think?

No, I don't think... Why would I back a product that I can't get any support for? I've heard nothing but horror stories about dealing with Sony.

Mike

One other thing about Disney DVD's... They tend to also push the encryption limits as well. I'd check with the manufacturer/service center to see if there is any firmware upgrade available for the DVD players that are having problems. Most likely, they are having trouble decoding the discs.

I had a customer complain about their disney discs too. Come to find out they were video CDs not DVDs. And they said they bought them $20 for 20in NYC. Hmmmmm.

lol I haven't completely shut the door on Sony, but one experience I had dealing with their tech was pretty exasperating. I had a customer with an elan system I installed add 2 300 disc sony changers and need me to program them into the system. After scanning the remote and the owners manual I could not figure out how to direct access discs via remote. I called Sonys tech and after a lengthy discussion with them they informed me that this unit was not capable of direct disc acess via remote. I was shocked to think anyone could be narrow minded enough to make a 300 disc changer and no way to direct disc acess via remote. after 2 hours of fiddling with the remote I found a way to do it through sequence of buttons and set up the macro and ended with a happy customer, but no thanks to Sony

Would you mind posting the process?

Edit: Never mind, I see you just did (assuming this works for both CD and DVD changers).

Woulkd you mind posting it in this thread anyway? I don't see where Larry saw it, but if it was a helpful thread that that nobody is commenting on, it will soon work its way off of page one, then off of page two....