I currently have one made by TSScorp or something. It cannot read parts of some rented DVDs while my cheapo stand alone DVD player has no problem reading them.
I had similar experiences with other PC DVDRWs. Are they of inferior quality compared to stand alone players? Can you recomend a good one for my PC?
TSSTCorp is Toshiba Samsung Storage Technology. About as good as any. Though different makes might have different “quirks.”
also, there have been some newer attempts to beef up the copy protection of commercial DVDs so sometimes PC drives will choke on that.
units in computers run a lot of hours and can have there functioning deteriorate after some time.
i have a Sony drives lasting a long time while other brands have died.
I don’t know that the drive has a problem. I think standalone dvd movie players just ignore checksum errors, while this is a no-no on data devices. I find a lot of errors can be corrected by carefully clearing the disk. I also find that old slow drives will often read disk that newer faster drives will barf on. I have an old drive in a usb enclosure that I bring out for problem disks.