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Can DVDs Kill DVD Players?
aidanpryde asks: "In the weirdest situation I've ever seen. My DVD player died on Saturday while watching the episodes of a favorite sci-fi series. I was watching disk 5 with my wife and noticed that it was getting jumpy. I took the disk out to see if it was dirty or scratched, but seeing nothing, we put the disk back in. Now the DVD player won't read anything, not the Season 5 disk, none of our other disks...nothing! So, we take the DVD player as a loss. Hardware failure happen all of the time, right? So I go downstairs with my wife on another day and try it on her DVD player in her computer. We get through one episode of the disk and it starts to jump again. We take it out, try another disk and sure enough -- nothing works. Has anyone ever run into DVD's that kill DVD players? Is there any way that I can get compensation for my dead DVD players? Is there any ideas as to why this has happened. Can I download firmware updates for the computer drive that may fix the problem?"
I can think of only two possibilities:
(1) A disk whose decoder disrupted your device's firmware; this may be related to your DVD's region setting, especially if it was set to "zone-free". This may have been deliberate or accidental. Does the player turn on? Do you get the big DVD screen when no disk is inserted? If so, try resetting the DVD's region settings. You may need to access a "hidden" menu; anyone have a source for how to bring up those menus handy?
(2) Because of the way the MPEG encoding on DVDs works, some encodings may require more CPU usage than others, and on a hardware decoder like in standalone DVD players, this may actually cause the processor to overheat. While letting the unit cool down may solve the problem, too much heat might actually induce a hardware fault.
I'd suggest carefully reading the DVD itself along with the case and any other material. If it says nothing about copy protection, or something like "This DVD smites computers" I'd immediately take it up with the studio that produced the DVD. Try to be nice, but at the same time exacting. If I were you, and there were no notices, or you can clearly prove that these DVD players were stand-alone devices, I'd take it to small claims court and get my $300 bucks back if they don't strike a reasonable deal.
Don't take no for an answer. Manufacturers should and are held responsible for damage to property under tort law.
The disc could be badly balanced and that's why it would shake and such. It could have damadged the drive mechanism.
I punched a baby once.
It was a nice Sony recorder, except for one little flaw... after you put in a scratched-enough CD, it stopped working forever.
Here I was, trying to use cdparanoia to recover some CDs, and my drive stopped working.
It took three RMAs before I finally convinced Sony to stop shipping me back the drive and fix the damn firmware. The next time the firmware was upgraded, and the drive gave several more years of good service (probably still works, wherever it is).
Back in college I worked as tech support in a computer lab ... ...
All of the sudden we had a rash of broken zip drives. After much aggrivation, interagation of users, and many new drives we traced the problem back to one bad zip disk that would kill the zip drive in such manner that the any disk placed in the newly busted drive would kill any drive it was put in such a manner that
Effectively we had a hardware computer virus
Besides the firmware eject command, there's a very old Mac trick that may still work: Hold down the mouse button on reboot, and wait. The computer used to interpret an extended click-hold during boot that as "eject all ejectable media" or something like that. Last time I used it myself was in the late 90's, to get an external SCSI Zip drive to cough up a bad disk.
~Philly
Guess I hit a nerve, but the fact remains consumer electronics are for the most part these days junk. Crappy circuit boards, marginal components. I work in the industry I know.
If the disc is warped, uneven, or unbalanced, it will cause DVD player failure. I know this because we've been through 6 DVD players in 3 1/2 years. My wife gets children's movies for my daughter from the library, they put stickers on them (on the center hub)... when these stickers are not placed on correctly they cause the disc to wobble, this kills motors dead.
Listen to the drive when you put a disc in, can you hear the disc spin up? If not, you've fried your motor, if so it's most likely a firmware issue. Since you've killed two DVD players though, it's more likely that the problem is the motor fried.
As powercycling the DVD player?
Either mechanical damage was done, or possibly a misauthored disc caused the DVD players' firmware to crash. (The fact that it killed a computer's DVD player too sounds odd though...)
If it's a misauthored disc, then simply powercycling may fix the problem. I mean a COMPLETE power cycle - unplug it, wait 2-3 minutes (sometimes more depending on what sort of memory backup features it might have), plug it back in.
I had this problem happen shortly after getting a DVD-R drive, one of my DVDs crashed the player. I thought it was broken at first, but a complete powercycle fixed it.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Oh, it's much worse than that.
You see, software vendors claim that when you buy software, it's not the media that you purchase, but the software product itself. This is the argument that they make against copying the ones and zeros that are on the media: That the media itself just carries their product.
Then, if their software product fails to work as advertised, or causes damage to your core OS or hardware, then they limit their liability to the cost of replacement media , claiming that the media is the extent of their product and its liability. That's why you can't return defective software to the store unless the MEDIA is scratched or damaged. They're getting it both ways, and not only do they sell their product for hundreds of dollars in many cases, but if it's buggy there isn't anything you can do to get your money back. I bought a game lately, Pirates Of the Carribean by Bethesda software. It had a bug which caused it to render a flat blue color over texels instead of texturing them with data. This made the game impossible to play. You couldn't see anything. I checked their site for a patch, and eleven months after the release date, there was still no patch. I called their tech support line, and I was told to wait, and that maybe there would be a patch, since other people had complained of the same problem. I figured that on a movie franchise game if they hadn't patched it within 11 months, it was over. No patch. I tried returning it to the store, no dice- I had opened it and they would only exchange it for the exact same product. So I called Bethesda and asked for a refund and they said that all they could do was send me a replacement media for 20 bucks. Nice. Then when the same companies argue DRM, suddenly their product is the ones and zeroes that don't FREAKING PRODUCE THE IMAGES SHOWN ON THE BOX . Before, it was the disk!