About 2 years ago, I bought the Toy Story DVD bundle - Toy Story 1, Toy Story 2, and a supplemental disk. I watched it a couple times, and since then it’s sat on our shelf, in its DVD case.
I took out Toy Story 2 today, since I’m sick and it sounded good. My DVD player basically spat it out. Hmmm… it’s a five disk player. Let’s try it in a different slot. No, still no go. OK, is the disk dirty or scratched? No, can’t see anything. Take some water and a paper towel and polish it up. Still won’t play.
Took it upstairs, stuck it in my computer’s DVD player. It plays fine.
So what’s going on with my DVD player? It’s obviously not the disk, since it plays on my computer just fine. My DVD player plays other movies just fine as well. Why won’t it play this one?
I guess attempts assone through asseight weren’t onerous enough.
To the OP:
Some discs don’t like some players. Is this the same player you played it on when the disc was new?
DVDs do not normally suffer from “laser rot,” the scourge of laserdiscs, but sometimes the layers of the disc can begin to delaminate. Delamination usually shows up as an area around the center hole of the disc which looks as if … well, as if the layers are starting to come apart.
If that were the problem, though, I would not expect it to play on other players, either. I recommend that you search at some of the DVD message boards to see if this is a known problem:
Use a DVD/CD player cleaner. They are disks that have tiny brushes embedded in the surface, and they will clean the DVD player. This solved the problems I had with my DVD-ROM drive only playing some DVDs.
Interesting. You don’t seem to see this too often with mainstream DVDs–I’m more used to hearing about these sorts of incompatibilites with anime DVDs where companies are pushing the envelope of the standard. Assuming it isn’t a physical defect, my guess would be either one of two things–either Disney didn’t make the DVD up to spec, or your player wasn’t made completely to spec. Only way to tell that it isn’t a physical problem with the disc is to try it in a couple different players. Without more information about the specs of the DVD and your player, that’s the best guess I can give you.
Well, I’m too young for LDs (other than as curiosities in school) but the idea is that the LD actually physically degrades, due to something in the material. It manifests as black areas and makes it just about unreadable.
Laser rot happened on those vinyl-album-sized laserdiscs because they were so big. Laserdiscs were made in two layers, which were then glued together; the media in the middle, the part that actually held the data, was made of aluminum.
The problem was that laserdiscs were so big and (relatively) heavy that, every time you picked them up, they experienced some “flex”, which caused the glue that held the two layers together to crack. Inevitably, moisture would get in at the seam and oxidize the aluminum layers. But laser rot didn’t make the disc unplayable unless it was very advanced; it would just degrade the picture, making it “snowy” by peppering it with random-colored pixels.
DVDs are so much smaller than laserdiscs that they don’t typically experience the same amount of flex and thus don’t experience laser rot; I’ve never heard of a single DVD with the problem. It’s not outside the realm of possibility, I suppose.
It’s far more likely, as others said above, that your player doesn’t like the disc. Some discs and some players just don’t get along. Tell us the manufacturer and model of your DVD player, and maybe we can find something.
Well, since the OP, the DVD player has decided not to play ANY dvds. Hmmm… never heard of a DVD cleaner, maybe I’ll try that before brining it in for service.
