Why do certain DVDs lose audio when using the "resume" feature?

Factual Questions
1

What happens: I’ll turn on the DVD player* to pick up watching from the day before. The “resume” feature allows me to hit “play” a couple of times to bring me back to where I was. On most DVDs, it works perfectly, but on others, it will start playing without any audio. In order to get the sound back, I have to “re-read” the DVD and go through the menus again. Sometimes, I have to remove the DVD from the player and reload it to get the audio.

This only happens on 10% of the DVDs that I watch. The DVDs that work fine always work fine, the ones that lose the audio always do it. What causes this strange problem?

*Phillips DVD711

2

I would guess a bug in the firmware of the DVD player. There are many differences between DVDs, and perhaps something about that 10% of the DVDs has some property that triggers that particular problem in the firmware.

I am guessing the player goes into sleep mode overnight, and the audio playing unit cannot recover (or recovers improperly) because of a particular property of the audio track on those DVDs.

3

Same thing with my first DVD player, a Hitachi P305. And yep, it’s damned annoying.

It sometimes also made a lot of disc-spinning noise on playback, enough so I’d sometimes raise the volume to cover it up. Arrgh.

And yet I’m still holding onto it as a backup… hey, you never know.