I have a strange issue with my DVD player (Pioneer DV-300). It works perfectly fine most of the time, but some films are only shown in black and white. For these films, there is also a kind of “grid effect” in the picture (like in old newspaper photos). I already checked several cables, that doesn’t seem to be the problem. The DVDs in question are “Ashes of American Flags” by Wilco and the DVD part of the Jayhawks’ anthology “Music From the North Country”. As I’m in Germany, I thought this could be a problem with the regional code, but I got both titles from Amazon Germany, and they play fine on my computer’s DVD drive. This problem also ocurred when playing some DIVX avi files, but not for all.
So, does anybody have a clue what could be the problem?
Are you sure these DVDs are PAL and not NTSC? I’m in the US and remember a had a DVD player that acted like that on PAL DVDs. My current DVD player is a Philips with HDMI output and plays both NTSC and PAL fine.
I checked the DVDs, and one is labeled as NTSC. For the other, I couldn’t find any specification. So I think that means I have to check the player’s manual to see if it is able to decode NTSC.
UPDATE: I checked the manual, and the player’s default setting for decoding is AUTO. But for some reason, I have to set it manually to NTSC for the DVDs in question, and voilà, color! Thanks for your help.
