OK so i bought a DVD off ebay, and the film won’t work in my DVD drive, it doesn’t even recognise there’s a DVD in there. The special features disk will work in my drive, and both disks will work in all the other DVD drives in the house. All my other DVDs work in the drive fine. Is it a software issue or is there a possibility that the drive just won’t support whatever format the disk is? Help!
“All other DVD drives in the house.” I’m guessing you have more than one PC based DVD drive. How many are burners? Can you rip the DVD and burn it and then play the copy in your new drive? I’ve had bad copies that I can rip on one drive, reburn it, and the copy then works fine in all the drives.
The cdrinfo forum is a great resource for all of these kinds of problems.
You forgot to identify your hardware, and the disc. It might have coding information in the fine print on the back of the DVD box. I hardly ever play DVDs on my computer, so I don’t have much to offer beyond helping you ask the question.
does the drive only play NTSC or PAL or does it play both as it should? If it were any other computer problem, i would be able to help you a lot more. I dont play DVDS on my computer. After all, i havent updated my computer except for the graphics card in the last 5 years. I’m a bit behind the times, i guess
yeah its likely to be an unsupported format like ntfs or pal depending on where your from. get a free program called dvd shrink and you can copy the dvd from your disc to your pc and change formats, make it smaller etc. reburn it to a format that should work like a .bin file or a wmv file then watch it on your pc.
its a vague guide beause its been a while since ive had to deal with official dvds:D
Hey guys thanks for your responses, my dad’s work PC has a burner on it so I’ll try making a copy of it and playing that. My original Dell drive burnt out last year so I’ve got some cheapo generic brand CD/DVD drive in there now. If it is a format issue it seems strange that the film is in one format, but the special features disk is in another. The box says it’s PAL incidently, which is the same as other DVDs I have that work fine. I’ll let you know what happens.
Sometimes problems like that can be due to DVD drive firmware problems. The drive manufacturer may have a firmware update for the drive that fixes that issue. Firmware updates can include fixes for reading particular brands of media or fixing other problems.
First identify what brand and model of DVD drive you have. Then go to the manufacturers support site and try to figure out what the latest firmware version is for your drive. Then try to figure out what firmware version you have on your drive. If you have an old firmware then update.
You need to be very careful that you look for the correct model and version of your drive. If you try to install the firmware for the wrong model you may “brick” the drive.
Firmware upgrades are VERY easy to do. But as JC says, you can DESTROY the drive if you try to install an incompatible version. If you’re going to do this, use your device manager to tell you what your drive make and model really are.
Ok, found some firmware updates here: downloaded the most recent one, it’s sitting on my desktop as a .rar file, how do I install it?
RAR is an archive format similar to ZIP files. Install an archive extracting program that can handle RAR files. I like 7-ZIP. It’s free and will extract RAR files.
When you extract the RAR file you’ll get an EXE. That EXE will rewrite the firmware on the DVD drive and update the drives firmware.
When updating the firmware on a device it is best to close all other running programs and disable active virus scanning. You don’t want anything to accidentally interrupt the firmware flashing process. And don’t fiddle with the computer while the firmware is being flashed. It may take a few minutes to complete.
Thanks john, unzipped and installed the firmware, but no change. Still works fine for other disks but doesn’t find the disk in question. I think I’m pretty much all out of options.
Is it a commercial DVD? What studio made the DVD?
Sony recently released a DVD that was unplayable on some DVD players because of the copy protection methods Sony added to the DVD. Sony is replacing that DVD for those who had problems.
You could have a DVD that has a similar problem.
You might also be able to get help or info in a CD/DVD related forum like CDROM Guide or CD Freaks.
LiteOn technical support may also be able to help if they’re aware of some titles that won’t play on their drives.
Copy protection on DVDs can be evil. Some methods add intentional defects to the DVD structure. Their trick is to make the defects such that the DVD can still play but such that DVD rippers no longer can read it. Sometimes they don’t get the balance right, as in the Sony case, and the DVD won’t play in some players.