DVD Player Up the Creek

[Spacecadet]

Buy a Windows Home Media centre


*Sorry, couldn't resist

[Clippy]

Might be worth giving a wet DVD lens cleaner a try before opening up the unit.

[NickFitz]

Thanks all. Having had a read of the service manual, which I found utterly incomprehensible, I decided the lens cleaner approach was worth trying first. I picked one up from Maplin when I was bimbling about this afternoon, and it seems to have gone some way towards alleviating the problem. Specifically: five previously-viewed discs which it refused to load last night now seem to load OK, as does one new and unplayed disc which it previously disliked; All The Preident's Men, which it previously played but recently refused to load, now loads as far as the studio ident but locks up the machine when it tries to display the menu (need to power off and on to get the disc to eject); and The Alan Clark Diaries, which it has previously played and which plays on the Mac, is rejected out of hand.

So it looks like the cleaning disc has done some good (I ran it six times in an attempt to get Alan working), but I may move on to the next step of opening up the drive and cleaning the lens manually with isopropyl alcohol.

Hours of fun... still, it's a bit more educational than just watching the DVDs, I suppose

[Clippy]

Have you tried cleaning it?

WCHS.

Try a lens cleaner first.

[Cliphead]

Have you tried cleaning it?

[The Agents View]

references

Happily.....

Who would you like to speak to? My wife??!? My Mum and Dad??

Actually, don't answer any of those - the mind boggles.....

[VectraMan]

I replaced my sad old DVD player recently as it was getting noisy, and one of the audio connectors snapped off the back. At the same time my old CD player was getting picky about which CDs it would play. It didn't seem worth investing money in DVD, so I bought a Sony Blu-Ray player for about £120 to replace both. It has composite out, which goes into a SCART converter for my sad old SD TV, and proper phono analogue red and white line outs for sound. So it was a straight replacement, but a future proofed one and obviously at some point I'll buy an HDTV and connect up the HDMI. Also means I can buy Blu-Ray from now on, even if I'm only watching it in SD for the time being.

[Bunk]

I have a 5 disc Sony DVD player with dual Scart outputs that you can have for the princely sum of a couple of beer tokens if you wish?

references

[The Agents View]

I have a 5 disc Sony DVD player with dual Scart outputs that you can have for the princely sum of a couple of beer tokens if you wish? I've not used it for a while, but it's perfectly serviceable - in fact it was extremely expensive when I bought it! These days its sat in the loft, replaced by media streamers and servers. My god I'm a geek.....

[NickFitz]

My only reliable DVD playing apparatus that has two SCART sockets, suitable for attaching to my very ancient TV at the end of a chain of other AV apparatuseses, has now become extremely pigheaded about which discs it will and won't play, to the extent that something I played two weeks ago is no longer acceptable, something I played two years ago is similarly persona non grata, and discs it has never seen before usually don't play yet some of them do. My overall conclusion is that it's screwed.

Opening it up and replacing the drive is the first option that springs to mind (assuming I can find a drive with the appropriate interfaces). However, a bit if digging leads me to believe that this might be just as expensive as buying a new but dirt cheap DVD player, although that would leave my SCART chaining arrangement in disarray.

Has anybody had any joy replacing the DVD drive in a consumer unit? I'm going to keep it anyway, as it's a dual DVD-VHS thingy, and I still have some VHS tapes that I need to copy over to DVD once I get the (entirely separate) DVD recorder working again, probably by taking that apart too