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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?"
DVDs are smallish, those big black things are laser discs.
Stop trying to squash them in your hardware, and everything will work out fine.
The DVD is possesed. Call a priest, and if one isn't available, burn it immediately.
I need it to leave around my workplace in some strategic places. Can't explain the details in a public forum, sorry.
There are also often firmware updates for non-computer based DVD players as well.
:D
I know that CyberHome and Panasonic have released firmware updates for some of their players over the past, and I'd bet others have too..
it works like:
burn a CD with the firmware file using a computer
put the CD into the DVD player
press "Play".
Hope you didn't fry it.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Have you ever traded in illegally pirated software? Did you ever copy a disk for a friend? Used Kazaa or other filesharing systems? Swapped tapes in your youth? Been to a friends house and listened to (i.e., pirated his record? Played your music too loud at red lights? Memorized parts of books you read at the library without previous authorization?
If so, you are automatically placed on the global MPAA shitlist. Any DVD you buy automatically detects your unique fingerprints (even if you just grip by the edge, you crafty pirate), and instructs even the cheapest korean DVD player to self-destruct.
You agreed to this on May 27, 1996 when you walked within 50 feet of our EULA in that wal-mart (you know, the one that uses the act of disagreeing with the terms and/or being unaware of them, to indicate agreement to the terms..our lawyers love that one).
Sorry old pal. Hate to do it to you. But that's the price of being a pirate.
**
Note, this post was a work of fiction. However, a young MPAA intern reading this post ejaculated approximately 65% of the way through. After changing his trousers, he is on the phone with his supervisor explaining this cool new invention he read about on "The Slashdots".
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.
I have a copy of Shaolin Soccer that killed a
Hitachi dvd player. I tried this copy on my Cyberhome
player but it refuses to play (suggesting something
wrong with disk). I got another copy of the movie
and that copy works okay. Apparently the crap
Hitachi player had something happen and now it won't
read any disks.
If the DVD is warped, no longer very flat, it might (?) hit the lens. ???
I have seen a warning on the back of Shintaro blank DVDs that says not to use it with Pioneer (some specific models that I can't remember) drives.
Apparantly unless you put in some after-market firmware the drive will be irrepairably damaged by burning onto these Shintaro blanks.
Wierd!!!
I drink to make other people interesting!
A similar incident was mentioned on the DVDAuthor users mailing list. Here's a link.
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).
... of a NIC I once had. It was a run-of-the-mill 3Com 905. Every computer it was installed in, the motherboard burned out within 2 or 3 days. I went through 3 motherboards before I figured out it was the Cursed-NIC-From-Hell.
I keep it around just so I can stomp on it now and then. It's quite therapeutic.
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
I've tried all my DVDs and they all work fine, and I have suffered absolutely no proble#$#$%$%$#%@#%%@$%@#$%REF$%$F^............NO CARRIER.
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
I bought the new Metallica album (St. Anger), and guess what, it ruined my CD player(which was aactually a HIFI system). i tried to read it on my PC CD player. same thing. Now the funny part is that i took it to the music store, who actaully gave me a new copy, and told me this should work with out any problems!!!!(For fuck sake, what do you mean without any problems, its a DAMN CD)
Luckily my HIFI was still under gurantee.
Out of the subject, but the album SUCKS big time
The lunatic is in my head
Moderation is to make the discussions more interesting. It's not a meritocracy. You're not a 'cooler' person because you have +1. Nobody cares what your real name is. etc. etc.
resigned
That's okay. Season 6 of "Buffy" is terribly depressing anyway, and Season 7 has the worst writing of the whole show. You've seen the most important parts.
Finished NetHack yet?
after you disconnect the power cord for a while.
- -- Truth addict for life.
You have an apex dvd player or similar cheap comsumer electronic junk. All I can say is what did you expect?
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
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?
The other day I was driving around in my car and it stopped running. While it was being repaired I was driving another car that stopped running too! I'm pretty sure that I'm the cause of it.
See where I'm going with this?
Nobody has suggested the extremely obvious possibility: both DVD drives failed. Perhaps they were going to fail for some time but they didn't start showing problems until you played a dual-layer DVD.
Its highly unlikely anything about that disc could "damage" your DVD drives. Its far more likely that both drives were near their failure point and failed by coincidence.
Not at all. In a future life you will be reincarnated as a VAX emulator.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
That is a damn good idea! - the best and most useful comment on this topic. Try it, and tell us what happens.
Maybe, but the record companies have promoted this "music" as being very good, when it is, in fact, trash.
The root of the problem is the fact that you're not (normally) allowed to return music after having listened to it. How are you supposed to know if it's any good if you can't listen to it beforehand?
If I go to Wal-Mart and buy a DVD player, or a stereo, or a power tool, I can bring it home, try it out, decide I don't like it, and put it back in the box and return it for a full refund. Most stores will allow this on most items. But not, curiously, for music, even though the act of playing a CD does not damage the disc in any way, and it can be re-shrinkwrapped and sold again, provided it wasn't scratched or mishandled.
CD players aren't as smart as DVD players. The data on a CD is just unencrypted PCM audio. 16 bits per sample, 2 channels, 44100 samples a second. But back in the day when CDs were invented, nobody thought it was important to be able to lock out competitors from manufacturing compatible media and equipment. Indeed, the specification was published -- in a certain volume with a rather fetching scarlet cover, the title of which escapes me -- specifically in order to allow everyone to be able to make CDs and players. Yes, even Fred in the Shed, if he had a particularly-well-equipped shed.
The bad news is that the pits and lands do not correspond directly to zeros and ones, but the good news is that it's "just" "simple" cross-interleaved Reeds code, for error correction, and if you are supremely foolha^H^H^H^H^H^Hconfident, you can just parse the "data" bits from the "parity" bits and feed them into your DACs. But it's not hard to build a simple logic matrix that does the error detection and correction.
CD-ROM uses an ingenious modification, where some of the error-proofing bits are replaced by addressing bits. This gives 2048-byte sectors and also has the advantage that the error-correction will be so shot to pieces, that any decent decoder will just spit out all zeros -- which will sound like silence. (Don't attempt to verify this using headphones, since a badly-implemented decoder could produce anything from DC to full-volume static).
For DVD, other concerns (like the movie studios making as much money as possible whether or not it might be morally justifiable) prevailed over not treating the people who pay your wages like shit. So while the disc itself is based physically on the original HDCD specification, the data is unnecessarily munged. (For instance, the audio/video data on a movie DVD is encrypted; although the rightful owner of a DVD is automatically entitled to decrypt it, by virtue of ownership, and may use reasonable force in pursuit of that right, so it serves fuck-all purpose except making life awkward for the person in the street.) And it's possible that there might be the ability to upgrade firmware by having a certain named file on the DVD, though the details would vary from one make of machine to another. One would hope that a sanity-check would be performed on the data first, and then (and only then) would the firmware be upgraded -- ideally, also depending upon some deliberate action by the user.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
It sounds as if you may have used the DVD player for an extended period of time. Heat buildup may be the cause of the failure. That's no excuse, but it's the best explanation I can come up with. I know this was a huge problem with my first DVD player (Panasonic DVD-A110), but I never experienced it probably due to infrequent use.
Sent from my iPhone
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!
DVDs that conform to the standard spec are only encoded with a series of zeros and ones. It is possible that this disk accidently included a two, confusing the playback hardware.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!